[Presentation of the international, emergency medicine relevant periodical spectrum and ethics and authorship and publication].

International scientific journals dealing with the broad subject of emergency medicine are listed. The following standards were applied: only journals from Europe or North America published in English or German were selected; whenever possible, the actual number of copies printed is mentioned; listing in the "Index Medicus" is stated; and, finally, the time course of the so-called "impact factor" from 1984 to 1992 is shown. The impact factor is a measure of how often the "average article" in a journal has been cited in a particular year. Basically it describes a ratio between actual citations and citable items published. It permits some qualification of quantitative data since it discounts the advantage of large journals over small journals and that of frequently published journals over less frequently issued ones. Journals from 12 different medical specialties have been selected for analysis: Emergency Medicine; Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine; Biomedical Engineering; Neurosciences; General Internal Medicine; Internal Medicine: Cardiology, Pulmonary Medicine, Infectious Diseases, and Public Health; Surgery; Pediatrics; Pharmacology; Physiology; Experimental Medicine. In addition, a few remarks are made dealing with ethics of publication and the increasing number of medical authors per article published. The terms "irresponsible authorship", "author inflation", "wasteful publication", and "abstract creep" are introduced and explained. Furthermore, strategies adopted from the literature to restrain those developments are introduced.