Top Critical Care Medicine journals
The leading journals in critical care medicine, ranked within their own field — not across all of science. The measure is computed from open data; how it works, and its limits, are set out in our method.
Scope: Critical Care (NLM Broad Subject Terms).
Grouped by quality band, best first, and listed alphabetically within each band — the bands are the ranking; we do not order named journals against one another.
- American journal of respiratory and critical care medicine
- Critical care : the official journal of the Critical Care Forum
- Intensive care medicine
- Critical care medicine
- Journal of safety research
- American journal of critical care : an official publication, American Association of Critical-Care Nurses
- Critical care clinics
- Current opinion in critical care
- Intensive & critical care nursing
- Nursing in critical care
- Seminars in respiratory and critical care medicine
- Anaesthesia, critical care & pain medicine
- Australian critical care : official journal of the Confederation of Australian Critical Care Nurses
- Critical care explorations
- Critical care nurse
- Critical care nursing clinics of North America
- Heart & lung : the journal of critical care
- Journal of critical care
- Journal of intensive care medicine
- Neurocritical care
- Pediatric critical care medicine : a journal of the Society of Critical Care Medicine and the World Federation of Pediatric Intensive and Critical Care Societies
- AACN advanced critical care
- Anaesthesia and intensive care
- Anaesthesiology intensive therapy
- Anästhesiologie, Intensivmedizin, Notfallmedizin, Schmerztherapie : AINS
- Critical care and resuscitation : journal of the Australasian Academy of Critical Care Medicine
- Critical care nursing quarterly
- Critical care science
- Dimensions of critical care nursing : DCCN
- Enfermería intensiva
- Enfermería intensiva
- Journal of veterinary emergency and critical care
- Medicina intensiva
- Medicina intensiva
- Revista Brasileira de terapia intensiva
35 ranked journals. Computed 2026-09-04, citation window 2019–2022. Journals too new or too small to rank fairly are not listed — “unranked” is not a zero.
Questions
- How does this relate to anaesthesiology and emergency medicine?
- Those are separate NLM disciplines with their own lists. A journal is ranked in its home field, so an anaesthesia or emergency-medicine title appears on its own page even though the three specialties overlap at the bedside.
- Does a top band mean the strongest evidence?
- No. The bands rank journals by citation reach within critical care, not the quality of any single trial. Use them alongside study design and your own reading.
- How current is this ranking?
- It is recomputed about once a year over a multi-year citation window, and the calculation date is shown beneath the list. Recent, fast-moving work may not yet be reflected in citation counts.
Spotted an error?
If a journal looks misclassified — the wrong discipline, a missing title, a band that seems off — please tell us at [email protected]. Every report gets an answer, and a confirmed error is corrected at the latest when the ranking is next recomputed.
What this is not
- This ranks journals, not individual articles: it says nothing about the validity of any single paper.
- It is not medical advice and no substitute for clinical judgement or reading the work itself.
- The ranking is factual and method-based, computed the same way for every title. Like any method that ranks journals, though, it carries bias and is not a definitive judgement on a journal's quality or relevance — neither an endorsement nor a criticism of any journal or publisher.
See also the Critical Care Medicine literature digest — a daily email of new critical care medicine articles, filtered by these same quality bands.