Purpose of review: Trauma scoring systems are used by researchers, registries, or individuals to describe injury severity or to estimate the prognosis of trauma patients. Triage scores also may influence the treatment of a trauma case.
Recent findings: The first trauma scores appeared about 40 years ago. Since then, multiple attempts to improve their performance have been published, or new scores were introduced. However, only few scoring systems manage to survive. Actual research focuses on further optimization of the available scores as well as the consequences of coding the injuries.
Summary: Cross-national comparisons evaluating different scores will further help to identify the optimal scoring system, based on the available information. The inclusion of patients with partially missing data is also an important task for the future.