Addictive Behaviors: A Comprehensive Journal Profile

Overview

Addictive Behaviors is a monthly, international, peer-reviewed scientific journal published by Elsevier that has been in continuous publication since 1975. It is one of the longest-running specialty journals devoted to the study of addictive behaviors and disorders, and it occupies a central position in the scholarly literature where psychology, psychiatry, public health, pharmacology, and neuroscience meet. The journal's standard identifiers are ISSN 0306-4603 for the print edition and ISSN 1873-6327 for the online edition; its CODEN is ADBEDS and its ISO 4 abbreviation is Addictive Behav. Elsevier lists the journal under its United Kingdom imprint, and the journal's online home is hosted on the ScienceDirect platform, where current volumes, article collections, and special issues are browsed and searched.

The journal's stated mission is to publish high-quality human research on addictive behaviors and disorders. It accepts full-length papers and short communications on substance-related addictions — including the abuse of alcohol, drugs, and nicotine — as well as behavioral addictions involving gambling and technology-mediated behaviors. Although the journal's emphasis falls primarily on behavioral and psychosocial research, its pages regularly carry work that spans psychology, sociology, psychiatry, epidemiology, social policy, medicine, pharmacology, and neuroscience. The editorial orientation is empirical first: sound experimental design combined with valid and reliable assessment and evaluation procedures is described as a requisite for acceptance. At the same time, the journal leaves room for innovative and empirically oriented case studies that might open new lines of inquiry, and it gives priority to studies that clearly contribute to current knowledge of etiology, prevention, social policy, or treatment. Scholarly commentaries on topical issues, systematic reviews, and mini reviews are encouraged, and the journal has expressed particular interest in multimedia papers that incorporate video or audio components to display methodology or findings more effectively.

Publication History

Addictive Behaviors was established in 1975 by Peter M. Miller of the Medical University of South Carolina, who founded the journal and served as its editor-in-chief for more than four decades, remaining at the helm until December 2017. The founding of the journal in the mid-1970s placed it among the early dedicated outlets for addiction research at a time when the field was consolidating from scattered clinical reports into a cumulative science. Under Miller's long editorship, the journal grew from a modest specialty title into a monthly publication with broad international authorship.

In January 2018, editorial leadership passed to Marcantonio M. Spada of the School of Applied Sciences at London South Bank University, who became the journal's second editor-in-chief. Spada's appointment marked a generational transition while preserving continuity with the journal's empirical identity. In a vision statement published on the journal's ScienceDirect news page, the incoming editor outlined priorities that included expanding the journal's presence in emerging and novel areas of addictive behavior — in particular addictive behaviors linked to technological use — and strengthening the relationship with, and the flow of submissions to, the journal's open-access sister title, Addictive Behaviors Reports. The statement framed the sister journal as an outlet for "non-traditional," innovative, and empirically oriented research that may not meet the publication threshold for the flagship title but remains worthy of scientific consideration. The transition also coincided with continued investment by Elsevier in the journal's editorial platforms and review workflows.

Aims and Scope in Detail

The journal's aims and scope statement, as published by Elsevier, describes Addictive Behaviors as an international peer-reviewed journal publishing high-quality human research on addictive behaviors and disorders. The scope is deliberately wide. On the substance side, it covers the abuse of alcohol, illicit and prescription drugs, and nicotine in all of their behavioral, clinical, and epidemiological dimensions. On the behavioral side, it covers addictions that do not involve an ingested substance, including gambling and technology-related behaviors such as problematic gaming and internet use. This dual coverage reflects the field's long-standing recognition that addictive processes share psychological and neurobiological mechanisms whether or not a chemical substance is involved.

Disciplinarily, the journal is a meeting ground. Its core is behavioral and psychosocial research, but accepted articles routinely draw on sociology, psychiatry, epidemiology, social policy analysis, medicine, pharmacology, and neuroscience. Theoretical orientations are described as diverse; what unites accepted work is empirical rigor. The journal prioritizes studies that advance knowledge of the causes of addiction (etiology), of how addictive disorders can be prevented, of the social policies that shape substance use and gambling environments, and of treatment approaches. Beyond original research, the journal publishes scholarly commentaries on topical issues, systematic reviews that synthesize accumulating evidence, and mini reviews that map fast-moving subfields. Multimedia submissions that use video or audio to demonstrate methods or findings are explicitly welcomed, reflecting the publisher's broader push toward richer digital article formats.

Article Types and Author Guidance

The journal's guide for authors defines several article categories with explicit length requirements. Full-length papers of original research should be no longer than 3,500 words with a 250-word abstract; word-length requirements exclude the title page, references, tables, and figures. Short communications of original research or pilot studies should be no longer than 2,000 words with a 250-word abstract, and the combined total of figures and tables should not exceed two. Editorials are by invitation only, should not exceed 1,000 words, express opinions about special topics of interest, and are intended to stimulate debate or new lines of research. Authors who wish to respond to editorials are directed to contact the editor-in-chief by email.

Submission follows the "Your Paper Your Way" model that Elsevier applies across many of its titles: the requirements for new and revised submissions are differentiated, and authors may initially submit a manuscript as a single Word or PDF file for refereeing, with formatting brought into full compliance only at the revision stage. All new submissions are first screened for the degree to which they match the journal's aims and scope. Manuscripts that pass screening proceed to peer review. Author benefits described by the publisher include free PDFs of published articles, a liberal copyright policy, and discounts on Elsevier publications, with further author services documented through the publisher's support channels.

Editorial Leadership

The journal's masthead, as documented in its author information materials, lists Marcantonio M. Spada (School of Applied Sciences, London South Bank University, London, UK) as editor-in-chief, with Peter M. Miller (Medical University of South Carolina) recognized as founding editor. The associate editor team has included Sheila M. Alessi (University of Connecticut), Arie Dijkstra (University of Groningen), Erin A. McClure (Medical University of South Carolina), and Jennifer E. Merrill (Brown University), with Clara M. Bradizza (State University of New York at Buffalo) serving as special sections editor. The broader editorial board has drawn on internationally recognized addiction researchers including Ian P. Albery, Amanda L. Baker, Roy F. Baumeister, Joël Billieux, Mark Griffiths, Zsolt Demetrovics, and many others across North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia. Readers should note that editorial board composition changes over time; the current roster is best confirmed on the journal's live editorial board page rather than treated as fixed by any single profile. This profile does not reproduce the full board roster as a static fact for that reason.

Peer Review and Editorial Process

Addictive Behaviors operates a conventional peer-review workflow managed through Elsevier's editorial systems. New submissions are first screened by the editorial office against the journal's aims and scope; manuscripts that do not fit are returned without external review. Submissions that pass screening are sent to independent reviewers, and acceptance requires reviewer approval followed by editor approval. The journal's ScienceDirect page displays publisher-reported review-speed statistics: 3 days from submission to first decision, 54 days from submission to decision after review, 130 days from submission to acceptance, and 3 days from acceptance to online publication. These figures are self-reported by the publisher and reflect medians across the journal's workflow at the time the page was last updated; the short first-decision figure reflects the inclusion of rapid editorial screening decisions alongside full peer-review outcomes. Authors should treat these as indicative rather than guaranteed timelines, since individual manuscripts vary with reviewer availability and revision rounds.

Abstracting, Indexing, and Discovery

The journal is abstracted and indexed in a wide set of bibliographic databases, which underpins its discoverability across the clinical, psychological, and biomedical literature. Indexing services listed for the journal include Scopus, the Science Citation Index Expanded, the Social Sciences Citation Index, Current Contents / Social and Behavioral Sciences, Index Medicus / MEDLINE / PubMed, PsycINFO, Embase, Biological Abstracts, BIOSIS Previews, CAB Abstracts, CINAHL, EBSCO databases, and Elsevier Biobase, along with nutrition, toxicology, health-and-safety, and pollution abstracting services documented in the journal's author information pack. Coverage in both the science and social-science citation indexes is notable: relatively few addiction journals are indexed across both the Science Citation Index Expanded and the Social Sciences Citation Index, and this dual coverage mirrors the journal's interdisciplinary author base. Directory records place the journal's Scopus coverage as continuous from 1975 to the present.

Citation Metrics and Standing (Attributed)

Bibliometric indicators for Addictive Behaviors are reported by several secondary sources, and they should be read as snapshots from those sources rather than as publisher-certified figures. Wikipedia's journal infobox, citing the Journal Citation Reports, gives the journal a 2025 impact factor of 4.1. The independent metrics site SciJournal computes a 2025 impact factor of 4.460 (up from 3.800 in 2024), an SJR score of 1.547 for 2025, and an h-index of 166, placing the journal above roughly 87 percent of all journals with a 2025 impact factor and above 91 percent of medicine journals in its comparison set. Resurchify's directory snapshot reports an impact score of 4.14, an SJR of 1.638, an h-index of 158, an overall rank of 2059, and best-quartile Q1 placements in Clinical Psychology, Medicine (miscellaneous), Psychiatry and Mental Health, and Toxicology, with coverage history 1975–2025. An older ResearchBite snapshot (coverage through 2023) reported an impact score of 4.73, SJR 1.328, and h-index 142. The trajectory across these snapshots is generally upward over the 2020–2025 window. Readers consulting metrics should always check the current Journal Citation Reports and SCImago listings directly, since aggregator snapshots differ in vintage and methodology.

Publishing Model, Access, and Rights

Addictive Behaviors is published on a subscription model with optional open-access publishing for individual articles; it is not a fully open-access journal. Authors who choose the open-access route can publish under open licenses in exchange for an article publishing charge, while the default route publishes articles behind the subscription paywall with the author benefits described above, including free PDFs and a liberal copyright policy. The journal's companion title, Addictive Behaviors Reports, provides a fully open-access venue within the same editorial family for work that fits the field but follows non-traditional formats (see the companion profile). Copyright for the journal's pages is held by Elsevier Ltd, and the publisher's standard text-and-data-mining reservations apply as stated on the ScienceDirect platform.

Special Issues and Article Collections

The journal regularly organizes special issues and article collections that concentrate research on emerging topics. A currently advertised call for papers, guest-edited by Cora von Hammerstein and Joël Billieux, focuses on problematic chemsex — individual risk and protective factors, the psychological processes involved, and the motivations leading to chemsex — with a submission deadline of 30 April 2026. Recent collections have addressed nicotine and tobacco topics (edited by Pamela Ling, Suchitra Krishnan-Sarin, Adam M. Leventhal, and Mary Ann Pentz), binge-related behaviors, and the intersection of free will debates with addictive behavior (edited by Roy F. Baumeister, Gideon Yaffe, and Amber Nadal). These curated collections function as agenda-setting instruments: they signal the directions in which the editorial team believes the field is moving and provide concentrated reading for researchers entering a subtopic.

Relationship with Addictive Behaviors Reports

Addictive Behaviors Reports is the journal's companion title: an open-access, peer-reviewed, online-only journal that offers an interdisciplinary forum for research in addictive behaviors. Elsevier describes it as accepting submissions that are scientifically sound across all forms of addictive behavior research. The flagship journal's editorial statements position the Reports title as having a particular interest in non-traditional, innovative, and empirically oriented work — including negative and null-data papers, replication studies, case reports on novel treatments, and cross-cultural research — that may not meet the flagship's publication threshold but remains worthy of scientific consideration. Authors whose manuscripts are not accepted by Addictive Behaviors may be offered transfer to the Reports title, and researchers can also submit to it directly. The two titles share editorial leadership and a common disciplinary community while serving complementary selectivity and access functions.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Addictive Behaviors publish? Peer-reviewed human research on addictive behaviors and disorders: substance-related addictions (alcohol, drugs, nicotine) and behavioral addictions (gambling, technology-related behaviors), with an empirical emphasis spanning psychology, psychiatry, epidemiology, medicine, pharmacology, and neuroscience.

Who publishes the journal, and how often? Elsevier publishes it monthly; it has appeared continuously since 1975.

What are the journal's ISSNs? Print ISSN 0306-4603; online ISSN 1873-6327.

Who is the editor-in-chief? Marcantonio M. Spada of London South Bank University, who succeeded founding editor Peter M. Miller in January 2018.

What are the manuscript length limits? Full-length papers: 3,500 words maximum with a 250-word abstract. Short communications: 2,000 words maximum with a 250-word abstract and no more than two figures/tables combined. Editorials are invited only and capped at 1,000 words. Limits exclude title page, references, tables, and figures.

Is the journal open access? No — it is a subscription journal with an optional paid open-access route per article. Its companion, Addictive Behaviors Reports, is fully open access.

Where is the journal indexed? Scopus, Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Sciences Citation Index, MEDLINE/PubMed, PsycINFO, Embase, Current Contents/Social and Behavioral Sciences, and others listed in the indexing section above.

What is the journal's impact factor? Secondary sources report a 2025 impact factor around 4.1–4.46 (attributed snapshots; verify in the current Journal Citation Reports).

The Journal's Role in Addiction Science

Over five decades of continuous publication, Addictive Behaviors has served as a primary record of how addiction science itself has evolved. In its early years the journal's pages reflected a field centered on alcohol and drug dependence treated largely through clinical and behavioral lenses. As the decades passed, the journal absorbed successive waves of conceptual change: the rise of cognitive-behavioral models of relapse, the incorporation of epidemiological and public-health perspectives, the emergence of gambling as a recognized behavioral addiction, and more recently the intense research attention devoted to technology-mediated behaviors such as problematic gaming and social-media use. The journal's willingness to publish across the full span from laboratory-based experimental psychopathology to population-level policy analysis has made it a useful barometer of the field's shifting center of gravity.

The journal has also been a venue where methodological standards in addiction research were negotiated and raised. Its insistence on valid and reliable assessment, on experimental designs capable of supporting causal inference, and on transparent reporting helped professionalize a literature that in the 1970s still carried a substantial share of uncontrolled clinical observation. Special sections and curated collections have repeatedly been used to consolidate knowledge in fast-moving areas — for example, the recent attention to chemsex as a distinct behavioral phenomenon at the intersection of substance use and sexual behavior, which the journal is addressing through a dedicated special issue. For readers new to the field, browsing a decade of the journal's tables of contents offers a compact education in what addiction researchers have considered important, how they have measured it, and where the unresolved debates lie.

What This Profile Does Not Claim

In keeping with a no-fabrication standard, several facts are deliberately left unstated here because no verified public source was available at the time of writing: the journal's current acceptance rate; the current article publishing charge for the optional open-access route; the precise current composition of the full editorial board (readers should consult the live board page); per-article reuse license terms beyond the publisher's general policies; and any current-year Clarivate Journal Impact Factor beyond the attributed snapshots above. Figures from aggregators (SciJournal, Resurchify, ResearchBite, JournalSearches) are attributed to those sources and reflect their data vintages, not independent verification by this profile.

Sources Consulted

Elsevier / ScienceDirect journal page for Addictive Behaviors (aims, scope, review-speed statistics, ISSNs, special issues, companion-title description); Elsevier author information pack for Addictive Behaviors (description, indexing list, editorial board, guide-for-authors summary); Elsevier Shop psychology journals listing (scope summary and companion-title note); ScienceDirect news pages (editorial vision statement, 2018); Wikipedia entry for Addictive Behaviors (founding editor, editor-in-chief transition, ISSN/CODEN, indexing list, 2025 impact factor); SciJournal, Resurchify, and ResearchBite directory snapshots (attributed metrics); Cyprus University of Technology Ktisis journal record (scope summary). A full source list is stored alongside this article.