Academic Journal

An academic journal (also called a scholarly or scientific journal) is a periodical publication that exists to disseminate original research and scholarship to a discipline’s expert community, under editorial and quality-control processes a general-interest publication does not use. The defining features are structural, not stylistic: a documented peer-review or formal editorial-review process, a named editorial board of subject-matter experts, a stable title with an ISSN, and a stated aims-and-scope that defines what the journal publishes and for whom.

This distinguishes an academic journal from three adjacent but different publication types: a magazine (general-audience, no peer review, revenue built on advertising), a trade publication (written by and for industry practitioners, may have editorial oversight but not scholarly peer review), and a blog or preprint server (no editorial board, and — in the case of a preprint — explicitly not yet peer reviewed). Any continuing serial can carry an ISSN, including magazines and newsletters, so an ISSN alone is not evidence that a publication is an academic journal.

What makes a publication an academic journal

No single feature is sufficient on its own; taken together, these are the checkable markers CASRAI’s own guides and dictionary entries use to distinguish a genuine academic journal from something merely styled like one:

• Peer review or formal editorial review, disclosed. Submitted manuscripts are evaluated by independent subject-matter experts (or, in some humanities fields, by an editorial team of at least two editors) before acceptance, and the journal states its review process publicly. See Peer Review: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters for the full process.
• A named, identifiable editorial board. A legitimate journal lists real editors and board members with verifiable institutional affiliations — not a fabricated or borrowed list. The Journal Reviewer entry covers the individual-reviewer role; the board is the standing group that sets editorial policy and oversees reviewer selection.
• A stable title and ISSN. An International Standard Serial Number, an 8-digit identifier assigned by the ISSN International Centre (issn.org) to any continuing print or online serial, uniquely identifies the journal’s title. It is necessary bibliographic infrastructure but not sufficient proof of scholarly legitimacy on its own — magazines and trade newsletters carry ISSNs too.
• An explicit aims and scope. The journal states what subject areas, article types, and audience it serves, so authors and readers can judge fit before submitting or citing.
• Original research content, with a citation apparatus. Articles report new findings, methods, or analysis (not just news or opinion), with the extensive references/bibliography typical of scholarly writing — see Abstract and the broader Scholarly Writing for Researchers pillar for manuscript-structure conventions.
• Discoverability in recognized indexes. Established journals are typically found in at least one subject or citation index — see “Finding and verifying a genuine academic journal” below.

These same criteria — genuine peer or editorial review, an identifiable editorial board of a stated minimum size, a valid ISSN, a dedicated website, and transparent author-fee disclosure — form the core of DOAJ‘s published application criteria for open-access journals, and overlap heavily with the Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing jointly issued by COPE, DOAJ, OASPA, and WAME — the closest thing the scholarly-publishing world has to a cross-body definition of what a legitimate journal must disclose.

How peer review works, briefly

Peer review is the mechanism that operationalizes “academic” for a journal: independent experts assess a submitted manuscript’s methodology, originality, and soundness before an editor decides whether to publish it. ICMJE’s guidance is explicit that the editor selects reviewers and is not bound to follow their recommendations — the editor makes the final call. Review models vary in how much reviewer/author identity is disclosed (single-anonymized, double-anonymized, open), a distinction now formally standardized as ANSI/NISO Z39.106-2023. Rather than re-deriving the full process here, see:

• Peer Review: What It Is, How It Works, and Why It Matters — the submission-to-decision process end to end
• Peer Reviewer: Role, Responsibilities, and How to Become One — what’s expected of the person doing the reviewing
• How to Know If an Article Is Peer Reviewed — checking a specific article, not just the journal
• Single-blind vs double-blind vs open peer review — comparing the identity-disclosure models

Types of academic journals

Access and business model vary independently of whether a journal is genuinely academic — a journal can be legitimate under any of these arrangements:

• Subscription/toll-access — readers or their institutions pay for access; no author-facing publication fee is typical.
• Open access — articles are free to read on publication. Subtypes include pure gold (fully OA, may or may not charge an article processing charge) and hybrid (a subscription journal that offers OA on a per-article, fee basis).
• Diamond/platinum OA — open access with no author-facing fee, typically subsidized by an institution, society, or funder.

None of these business models is itself evidence of legitimacy or its absence — predatory journals specifically exploit the open-access, author-pays model to charge a real fee while skipping or faking the peer review and editorial oversight that would otherwise justify it.

Finding and verifying a genuine academic journal

Two related but different tasks: finding journals relevant to a topic, and verifying that a specific journal (or one soliciting a submission from you) is genuinely academic rather than predatory or otherwise substandard.

Finding journals

• Library databases and discovery services — a university or institutional library’s subject databases and discovery layer are curated specifically to surface legitimate scholarly venues in a given field; a librarian can also advise on discipline-specific indexes not covered below.
• DOAJ (doaj.org) — for open-access journals specifically, DOAJ’s directory lists only titles that have passed its application review against the criteria above; it is the standard first stop for confirming an OA journal’s legitimacy.
• Subject and citation indexes — Scopus, Web of Science, and PubMed/MEDLINE (for biomedicine) each apply their own editorial-quality criteria before accepting a journal for ongoing inclusion. See What Does It Mean for a Journal to Be Indexed? for exactly what each database checks and how indexing differs from a journal’s Journal Impact Factor.

Verifying a specific journal

• Check the journal’s own site for a disclosed peer-review policy, a named editorial board with real institutional affiliations, and a clear aims-and-scope.
• Confirm its ISSN resolves to the correct title via the ISSN Portal, and — for OA journals — confirm it is actually listed in DOAJ rather than merely claiming DOAJ affiliation.
• Check whether it appears in Scopus, Web of Science, or PubMed/MEDLINE (see the indexing guide above) — inclusion in any recognized index is a strong positive signal, though a genuine journal can still be too new or too niche to be indexed yet.
• Use the community checklist at Think.Check.Submit alongside CASRAI’s own guide to identifying predatory journals and publishers if anything about a solicitation or a journal’s practices looks off — vague/mass-email solicitations, an unusually fast “peer review,” opaque or undisclosed fees, or a fabricated editorial board are the checkable red flags covered there.

Related terms

• Predatory journal
• Open access journal
• Hybrid journal
• Pure gold journal
• Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
• Science Citation Index (SCI/SCIE)
• DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals)
• Journal Reviewer
• Preprint
• ANSI/NISO Z39.106-2023 (Peer Review Terminology Standard)