https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2826-3019
City dwellers of a certain age will recall lengthy waits for a bus followed eventually by the arrival of three on the same route driving nose-to-tail. So it is with intravenous hypnotics. Since the discovery of propofol, it has been a long wait. Now we have remimazolam (two different versions) launched worldwide, ciprofol in phase 3 studies, and several other candidates in the early stages of development. The editorial offices of scientific journals receive news of these projects as papers, letters, and abstracts; these take their chances with peer review and editorial sentiment. Growth in the pace and breadth of the publishing process has been matched by a progressive increase in submissions of original research and particularly of reviews (fig. 1).
Asian investigators now dominate the field. Of 734 publications concerning remimazolam since 2010, 73% came from China, Japan, or South Korea. Since 2022 the proportion has increased...
