About Notfall und Rettungsmedizin

Notfall und Rettungsmedizin

Notfall + Rettungsmedizin is the interdisciplinary journal for emergency medicine published by Springer in Berlin and Heidelberg, and the official organ of the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine (DIVI). It addresses aspiring and experienced emergency physicians as well as the entire emergency team — from paramedics to emergency-department staff — with peer-reviewed original research, case reports, comprehensive review articles and certified continuing education. Published since 1997, it ranks among the ten most-read journals of the Springer Medizin publishing house.

Overview

Notfall + Rettungsmedizin is a German-language specialist journal for emergency medicine, published by Springer (Berlin/Heidelberg) in print and online. The print ISSN is 1434-6222 and the online ISSN 1436-0578; the journal is indexed on link.springer.com under journal number 10049. Its stated aims focus on preclinical and in-hospital emergency medicine, quality management, and emergency-care research. The audience is deliberately interdisciplinary: emergency physicians, emergency-medicine specialists, and the whole emergency team, including rescue assistants and paramedics. Each issue is built around comprehensive review articles on a current focus topic — the core of every edition — presenting secured knowledge with high relevance for daily work in acute medicine as concrete recommendations for action. Alongside the reviews, freely submitted original articles present research results from current studies and promote scientific exchange, while case reports (Kasuistiken) show interesting case examples and unusual emergency or treatment courses. A dedicated "CME Zertifizierte Fortbildung" section publishes secured research results in review form, letting physicians, rescue assistants and paramedics test their knowledge after reading and earn certified CME points online, oriented to the specialty's continuing-education regulations.

History

The journal's bibliographic record begins in 1997: a pilot issue 0/1997 appeared under the title "Notfall," and from volume 1 in 1998 the journal has been published by the Springer medicine imprint in Heidelberg as "Notfall + Rettungsmedizin." It was established as the organ of the Deutsche Interdisziplinäre Vereinigung für Intensiv- und Notfallmedizin (DIVI), the German interdisciplinary association for intensive care and emergency medicine, anchoring it institutionally in the specialty's professional community. Over nearly three decades it has tracked the professionalization of German emergency medicine: the rise of quality management, the debate over a dedicated specialist curriculum in emergency medicine, the staffing crisis in rescue services, and the reform efforts around emergency structures and hospital landscapes. The journal's 2016 "Eckpunktepapier" on the population's emergency-medical care — a consensus process involving leading scientific societies, institutions and organizations — became its most-cited article, with more than 36,000 views and downloads and 105 Web of Science citations, illustrating the journal's role as a forum where the specialty negotiates its own standards. In 2022, as part of Springer Medizin's equality initiative, the house replaced male-job-title-based journal titles with specialty-based ones; Notfall + Rettungsmedizin, already titled by discipline, was unaffected. It remains one of Springer Medizin's ten most-read journals, alongside titles such as MMW, Der Nervenarzt and Die Anaesthesiologie.

Coverage and Content

The content programme is organized around the review article as the centrepiece: comprehensive overviews of a current focus topic deliver secured knowledge as actionable recommendations for acute medicine. Recent volumes have covered topics such as the medical directors of emergency medical services in Germany, feedback systems between rescue services and hospitals, the self-assessed competence of paramedics in administering intravenous morphine, the availability of response forces in civil protection, and the expert-panel "Fürther Gespräche" with demands addressed to policymakers and society. Original research articles go through double-blind peer review with at least two independent experts, following the ICMJE uniform requirements for biomedical manuscripts; invited manuscripts are likewise assessed by independent specialists. The CME section translates research into certified education for the whole emergency team. The journal also serves as the specialty's policy forum: commentaries such as the 2025 plea to preserve interdisciplinary emergency medicine in the debate over a "Facharzt für Notfallmedizin" curriculum appear alongside empirical studies. The 2025 Eckpunktepapier update on prehospital and in-hospital emergency care, extending the landmark 2008 and 2016 papers, shows the journal's continuing function as the venue where the field's structural blueprints are published and debated. The trajectory of these papers mirrors the specialty's own development: the 2008 paper first defined framework conditions and targets for planning emergency-medical care; the 2016 update extended the scope to acute care in hospitals, arguing that definitive treatment of life-threatening emergencies often only becomes possible in the clinic and that the time to definitive care depends not only on the distribution of rescue resources but decisively on how quickly the suitable hospital can be reached. The consensus process behind the 2016 paper brought together renowned scientific societies, institutions and organizations from all areas of acute and emergency medicine, and its quality-indicator work fed directly into the definition of quality indicators for the German rescue services. For a journal, hosting such papers is both an editorial achievement and a statement of function: Notfall + Rettungsmedizin is where the specialty writes its own rules.

Organization and Ownership

Notfall + Rettungsmedizin is published by Springer, the Berlin/Heidelberg science publisher that is part of Springer Nature; the medicine programme is run by the Springer Medizin Verlag, formed in 2016 from the merger of Springer Medizin Berlin/Heidelberg, Urban&Vogel, the Ärzte Zeitung Verlag, Steinkopff, MED.KOMM., the Springer health and pharmacy publisher and BSMO. The journal is the official organ of the DIVI, the German Interdisciplinary Association for Intensive Care and Emergency Medicine, which gives it its institutional anchoring in the specialty. Editorial quality assurance follows the standard Springer peer-review workflow: all manuscripts, including invited ones, are assessed by independent experts, with original articles and case reports undergoing double-blind review by at least two independent referees under the ICMJE uniform requirements. The journal's commercial model is the standard Springer specialist-journal subscription: institutional and personal subscriptions, with preferential pricing historically offered to physicians in training, rescue assistants, paramedics and students. The journal's content is distributed through link.springer.com and the springermedizin.de portal, Springer Medizin's professional platform.

Digital Presence

The journal's digital home is split between the professional portal springermedizin.de/notfall-rettungsmedizin and the scientific platform link.springer.com/journal/10049, where volumes, issues and individual articles are accessible with metrics on views, downloads and citations. The springermedizin.de page presents the journal's aims and scope, its peer-review standards and its CME programme to the professional audience. Individual articles carry DOIs in the 10.1007/s10049 series and are indexed in the Web of Science, with the most-cited papers — led by the 2016 Eckpunktepapier — documenting the journal's scientific footprint. The FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg research database CRIS lists the journal with its print and online ISSNs and dozens of indexed publications, reflecting its role in the German emergency-medicine research output. University libraries provide access through the Electronic Journals Library and national licence agreements. As one of Springer Medizin's ten most-read journals, Notfall + Rettungsmedizin benefits from the publisher's portal traffic, and its CME online testing integrates the journal into the daily continuing-education workflow of emergency physicians and paramedics across Germany. The journal's discoverability is reinforced by its presence in the major bibliographic systems: the KIT library catalogue records the online resource from 1997 with the online ISSN 1436-0578 and the print lineage from the 1997 pilot "Notfall" through "Notfall + Rettungsmedizin" since 1998, while the Electronic Journals Library documents the subscription-based full-text access. For researchers, the link.springer.com article pages provide per-article metrics — views, downloads, citations — that make the journal's impact visible in real time. For practitioners, the springermedizin.de portal bundles the journal with the publisher's wider emergency-medicine offering, so that a paramedic preparing for a shift and a researcher writing a grant application meet the same title from different directions.