The Society of Critical Care Medicine (SCCM) is the largest multiprofessional organization dedicated to the care of critically ill and injured patients. It was founded in 1970 at a meeting of 29 physicians in Los Angeles, and Max Harry Weil served as its first president. SCCM is headquartered in Mount Prospect, Illinois, and represents intensivists, nurses, pharmacists, respiratory therapists and other members of the ICU team across more than 80 countries.

SCCM is not a large multi-disciplinary press. It publishes exactly three peer-reviewed journals, all produced with Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (Wolters Kluwer Health): Critical Care Medicine, Pediatric Critical Care Medicine, and Critical Care Explorations. That focus is the point - if your paper is about intensive care, these are among the most-read venues in the field. This guide covers which title fits your manuscript, what open access costs, how peer review runs, and how to submit.

• Critical Care Medicine - original clinical investigations, laboratory science, systematic reviews, and the society's clinical practice guidelines (the Surviving Sepsis Campaign guidelines and the PADIS/pain-agitation-delirium guidelines have appeared here). Its 2025 Journal Impact Factor was approximately 7.5 in the June 2026 JCR release.

• Pediatric Critical Care Medicine - clinical and translational research in pediatric intensive care and critical care neonatology, plus consensus statements from pediatric critical care societies. Approximately 4.9 JIF in the same release.

• Critical Care Explorations - open-access rapid communications: traditional research articles alongside time-sensitive work on quality and safety, methodological and technical advances, healthcare economics, predictive modeling, and the practice impact of new studies. Approximately 2.9 JIF.

SCCM also produces the Critical Connections newsletter, an SCCM podcast, and Congress abstract supplements, but those are not peer-reviewed research venues.

Publishing in the subscription track of CCM or PCCM carries no author fee. APCs are set and revised by Wolters Kluwer rather than by SCCM, so treat the figures above as indicative and check the journal's own author-fees page before you submit. Authors at institutions with a Wolters Kluwer read-and-publish agreement may have the hybrid fee covered - your library will know. Discounts and waivers for authors in lower-income countries are administered through Wolters Kluwer's programs and are normally requested at acceptance.

All three journals use single-anonymized external peer review: reviewers see author identities, authors do not see reviewer identities. Submissions are screened by an editor before review, and a substantial share are rejected without external review to keep turnaround short. SCCM runs a Reviewer Academy with training modules for its reviewer pool, which is unusual among societies of this size and is a reasonable signal of review quality. Critical Care Explorations is explicitly designed for speed and is the right choice when timeliness matters more than the flagship's selectivity.

1. Pick the journal. Adult flagship work to CCM, pediatric and neonatal to PCCM, rapid or methods-oriented work to CCE.
2. Read the Information for Authors on the journal's page at journals.lww.com - each title has its own article types, word limits and structured-abstract rules.
3. Format the manuscript. SCCM journals use AMA numbered citation style. Prepare your manuscript with the SciSpace template for the target journal.
4. Submit through Editorial Manager, linked from each journal's Information for Authors page. Register once and you can use the same account across the three titles.
5. Handle revisions and OA election. If you want open access on CCM or PCCM, you elect and pay it after acceptance, not at submission.

SCCM's journals follow COPE guidance on authorship, conflicts of interest, corrections and retractions, and Wolters Kluwer applies its own publishing-ethics policies across the Lippincott portfolio. Expect ICMJE-style disclosure forms, trial-registration requirements for clinical trials, and reporting-guideline compliance (CONSORT, STROBE, PRISMA) as appropriate to the study design. Financial relationships with industry must be declared for every author.