Acta Anaesthesiologica Scandinavica
Lars S Rasmussen, Editor in Chief

Acta Anaesthesiologica Scandinavica (Acta) is an international journal that publishes articles within the fields of anaesthesia, intensive care medicine, pain, and emergency medicine. Most of the submissions and articles are related to perioperative medicine, and each year we receive nearly 1000 manuscripts. The majority is from outside Scandinavia, and only around one-third of the printed articles are from Scandinavia. Last year we rejected more than 75% of all submitted manuscripts.

Manuscript handling is electronic, using ScholarOne (http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/aas), and all articles can be read or downloaded from the journal homepage (http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118481009/home), including the first articles from 1957 and those most recently accepted but not yet printed (Early View). The homepage also contains interesting lists of most accessed and most cited articles. Citations are important for ranking journals, and our Impact Factor has increased to 2.26 which gives us a place as number 11 among Anaesthesiology Journals, and number 8 if specific pain journals are excluded. We try to handle manuscripts as quickly as possible, and the average time from submission to first decision was 36 days in 2009.

The editorial board consists of 20 experts from all Scandinavian countries, and this group has a number of challenges in addition to evaluation of submissions, including recruitment of new manuscript, especially editorials and review articles. We publish three types of review articles:
Topical reviews are articles that describe the current status a research field as an update for the general reader.
Expert's opinions are articles that cover a specific clinical problem and contain recommendations for clinical practice.
Systematic reviews that must adhere to the required format for these highly focused articles.

Future challenges are to obtain a better position on the ranking list but also to be more visible within intensive care medicine, pain, and emergency medicine. We also publish articles on education and ph.d. –dissertation abstracts from Scandinavia.
Authors are encouraged to read our author guidelines carefully. Commonly, there are problems with the title page and the format of the references. Reports of randomised trials must conform to the CONSORT guidelines. For such studies, a flow diagram should be a part of the manuscript and a completed Consort Checklist must be submitted with the manuscript. For other types of studies, the CONSORT checklist is also very useful, for instance the focus on a specific primary hypothesis and one primary endpoint.