About CurrentAnesthesia
What’s included
CurrentAnesthesia covers newly published anaesthesia research in humans, from a fixed set of leading journals. These are the rules that decide what becomes a Brief.
Coverage
Journals
CurrentAnesthesia monitors 35 anaesthesia and critical care, general medical, surgical and respiratory journals. The list is reviewed each year.
The archive holds research published Jan 2023 – Dec 2026. The archive reaches back to January 2023 today and grows backwards, one quarter at a time, towards October 2016.
Study types
What becomes a Brief
Studies in humans that have an abstract. A Brief is made even when the abstract leaves details out; those are marked as not reported.
Included
- Randomised controlled trials
- Observational studies
- Meta-analyses
- Diagnostic and prognostic studies
- Secondary analyses of trials
- Mechanistic or translational studies with an anaesthesia question
- Society statementsScientific statements, consensus documents and position papers: their own type, summarised without a results section
Not included
- Editorials
- Letters
- Case reports
Scope
Anaesthesia relevance
Every study in an anaesthesia or critical care journal counts as anaesthesia research, with the one exception for newborns below. Elsewhere the line is drawn as follows.
- General medical, surgical and respiratory journals
- Included when the patients are critically ill — in intensive care, after cardiac arrest, or with shock, sepsis, acute respiratory failure needing respiratory support, or major trauma needing resuscitation — or when the study examines care the anaesthesia or intensive care team gives around surgery, during procedures, in labour and delivery, in intensive care or in resuscitation. The same treatment given on a medical ward or in outpatient care is not included.
- Surgery
- Anaesthesia, postoperative pain relief and perioperative care, such as prehabilitation and enhanced recovery, are included. The choice of surgical technique or device, and surgeon or hospital factors, are not; nor is a surgical comparison whose only link is postoperative complications, mortality or length of stay.
- Respiratory disease
- Acute respiratory failure treated with ventilation, high-flow oxygen or ECMO is included. Chronic respiratory disease — COPD, asthma, interstitial lung disease, sleep-disordered breathing, home ventilation — and patients on the ward who need no organ support are not.
- Newborns
- Anaesthesia for neonatal surgery is included. Neonatal intensive care and the resuscitation of newborns at birth are not included, from any journal.
Organisation
Topics and updates
Every Brief is placed in one of 17 topics, and the journals are monitored continuously for new research.