Top General & Digestive Surgery journals
The leading journals in general & digestive surgery, 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: General Surgery (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.
Top 5%
6
- Annals of surgery
- Clinical oral implants research
- JAMA surgery
- Journal of neurointerventional surgery
- The British journal of surgery
- World journal of emergency surgery : WJES
Top 10%
6
- Aesthetic surgery journal
- Current problems in surgery
- Implant dentistry
- JAMA facial plastic surgery
- Journal of surgical education
- The Surgical clinics of North America
Top 25%
21
- American journal of surgery
- BMC surgery
- Canadian journal of surgery. Journal canadien de chirurgie
- Clinics in plastic surgery
- Facial plastic surgery clinics of North America
- International journal of oral and maxillofacial surgery
- International journal of surgery
- JMIR perioperative medicine
- Journal of cranio-maxillo-facial surgery : official publication of the European Association for Cranio-Maxillo-Facial Surgery
- JSLS : Journal of the Society of Laparoendoscopic Surgeons
- Langenbeck's archives of surgery
- Operative dentistry
- Oral and maxillofacial surgery clinics of North America
- Plastic and reconstructive surgery
- Scandinavian journal of surgery : SJS : official organ for the Finnish Surgical Society and the Scandinavian Surgical Society
- Surgery
- Surgical pathology clinics
- The International journal of oral & maxillofacial implants
- The Journal of surgical research
- Updates in surgery
- World journal of surgery
Top 50%
22
- Advances in surgery
- Aesthetic plastic surgery
- Annals of plastic surgery
- Atlas of the oral and maxillofacial surgery clinics of North America
- CRSLS : MIS case reports from SLS
- Facial plastic surgery & aesthetic medicine
- Facial plastic surgery : FPS
- Journal of investigative surgery : the official journal of the Academy of Surgical Research
- Journal of laparoendoscopic & advanced surgical techniques. Part A
- Journal of oral and maxillofacial surgery : official journal of the American Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons
- Journal of plastic, reconstructive & aesthetic surgery : JPRAS
- Journal of stomatology, oral and maxillofacial surgery
- La Presse médicale
- Microsurgery
- Oral and maxillofacial surgery
- Oral surgery, oral medicine, oral pathology and oral radiology
- Photobiomodulation, photomedicine, and laser surgery
- Revista do Colégio Brasileiro de Cirurgiões
- Surgery today
- Surgical innovation
- The British journal of oral & maxillofacial surgery
- The surgeon : journal of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons of Edinburgh and Ireland
Unranked
35
- Acta chirurgica Belgica
- Acta cirúrgica brasileira
- Annales de chirurgie plastique et esthétique
- Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England
- ANZ journal of surgery
- Asian journal of surgery
- Chirurgia
- Cirugia española
- Cirugía y cirujanos
- Cirugía española
- Der Chirurg; Zeitschrift für alle Gebiete der operativen Medizen
- Die Chirurgie
- European surgical research. Europäische chirurgische Forschung. Recherches chirurgicales européennes
- Handchirurgie, Mikrochirurgie, plastische Chirurgie : Organ der Deutschsprachigen Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Handchirurgie : Organ der Deutschsprachigen Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Mikrochirurgie der Peripheren Nerven und Gefässe : Organ der Vereinigung der Deutschen Plastischen Chirurgen
- International surgery
- Journal of perioperative practice
- Journal of plastic surgery and hand surgery
- Journal of the College of Physicians and Surgeons--Pakistan : JCPSP
- Khirurgiia
- Klinichna khirurhiia
- Magyar sebészet
- Minerva chirurgica
- Minerva surgery
- Plastic and aesthetic nursing
- Polski przeglad chirurgiczny
- Revista medico-chirurgicală̆ a Societă̆ţ̜ii de Medici ş̧i Naturaliş̧ti din Iaş̧i
- South African journal of surgery. Suid-Afrikaanse tydskrif vir chirurgie
- Techniques in hand & upper extremity surgery
- The American surgeon
- The Cleft palate-craniofacial journal : official publication of the American Cleft Palate-Craniofacial Association
- The Journal of craniofacial surgery
- The journal of hand surgery Asian-Pacific volume
- The Journal of oral implantology
- Vestnik khirurgii imeni I. I. Grekova
- Zentralblatt für Chirurgie
90 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
- Are the surgical sub-specialties (vascular, cardiac, plastic, neuro…) here?
- Only those the NLM files under General Surgery. Many sub-specialties — vascular, cardiac, neurosurgery — are separate disciplines with their own lists, and their journals are ranked there rather than merged in.
- Does a higher band mean a better surgical journal for my field?
- Not necessarily. The bands measure citation reach across general surgery as a whole; a strong sub-specialty journal may sit below the broad flagships. Treat it as a starting point.
- 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 General & Digestive Surgery literature digest — a daily email of new general & digestive surgery articles, filtered by these same quality bands.