Australasian Marketing Journal (AMJ)

About Australasian Marketing Journal (AMJ)

Australasian Marketing Journal (AMJ) — A Complete Profile

The Australasian Marketing Journal, universally shortened to AMJ, is the peer-reviewed marketing journal of the Australasian region, published by SAGE Publishing with print ISSN 1441-3582 and online ISSN 1839-3349. The Journals World record lists the same identifiers, the publisher as SAGE Publishing, the country as Australia, and an h-index of 86. SAGE's own journal pages currently display an Impact Factor of 3.8 and a five-year Impact Factor of 7.7. A 2026 editorial in the journal, reviewing its recent development, reported a Scopus CiteScore of 14.9 in one comparison table and placed the journal at the top of its regional peer set on several measures — figures this profile discusses below with their dates attached, because marketing metrics move quickly and an undated number is a misleading number.

AMJ occupies a specific niche that authors must understand before submitting. It is not a regional newsletter and it is not a general business journal. It is a fully international, indexed marketing journal — ranked in the top quartile in SCImago's marketing and economics categories in recent years — whose identity and community come from Australia, New Zealand and the wider Asia-Pacific. Its sponsoring scholarly community is the Australian and New Zealand marketing academy, the network whose annual conference is ANZMAC, and its editors and authors are drawn heavily from that community while publishing work from around the world. A paper on consumer behaviour, services, digital marketing, branding, marketing education or sustainable marketing, executed to international standards, belongs here whether its data come from Sydney, Seoul or Stockholm. A purely local practitioner piece with no theoretical contribution does not, and neither does a technically strong paper whose implications stop at a single firm's sales figures.

History: From Asia-Australia Marketing Journal to SAGE Flagship

The National Library of Australia catalogue traces the journal's lineage to the early 1990s. A predecessor titled Asia-Australia Marketing Journal was published at Caulfield East, Victoria, by the School of Marketing in Monash University's David Syme Faculty of Business from 1993, running to volume 5 in 1997, quarterly, in association over time with the Australian Marketing Institute and Monash's Department of Marketing. Its stated purpose, preserved in the catalogue record, was to give academics and industry marketers in Australasia and the Asia-Pacific a forum for exchanging current ideas and best practice in marketing. The later title, Australasian Marketing Journal: AMJ, succeeded it under a related ISSN line, and that regional-forum mission — academic rigour joined to relevance for Australasian marketing — still describes the journal's self-image.

Two later developments transformed its reach. The first was the move to a major international publisher: AMJ is now published by SAGE, distributed through the SAGE Journals platform, and produced to the standards of SAGE's global business list, with online-first publication, structured submission guidelines and the promotional machinery of a large publisher behind each article. The second was sustained improvement in citation performance, documented by the editors themselves. Writing in 2026, editors Lara Stocchi and Paul Harrigan — who also serve as the journal's editorial-office contacts in SAGE's current guidelines — compared AMJ with peer journals rated A on the Australian Business Deans Council (ABDC) list and with other regional journals, and concluded that AMJ held the highest CiteScore among the ABDC A-rated marketing comparison set in their table, the second-highest SCImago Journal Rank in that set, and performance ahead of other regional publications including the leading Australasian management journal, across the metrics they examined. Downloads reported in that editorial — close to 390,000 article downloads in the twelve months to March 2025 — indicate a readership well beyond the citing academy. Authors should verify the current ABDC rating and metrics on the official lists at submission time, since both are revised, but the direction of travel the editorial documents is consistent: this is a journal that has grown from a regional forum into the region's leading marketing title.

Scope: What AMJ Publishes

SCImago classifies AMJ under Marketing and under Economics and Econometrics, and its recent best quartile is Q1 in those categories. The Journals World record lists the subject matter visible across its contents: marketing and advertising strategy, consumer behaviour and brand identification, customer service quality and loyalty, digital marketing and social media, consumer market behaviour and pricing, marketing influence, management and marketing education, service and product innovation, retail behaviour, and environmental sustainability in business. Read together, those headings define a mainstream-but-broad marketing scope: consumer research, marketing strategy, services marketing, digital and social-media marketing, branding, retailing, business-to-business marketing, marketing education, and the growing intersection of marketing with sustainability and social impact.

Methodologically the journal is pluralist, as modern marketing journals must be. Quantitative modelling and experiments, survey-based consumer research, qualitative and interpretive studies, conceptual papers and systematic reviews all appear, provided the paper makes a clear contribution — to theory, to method, to practice or to policy — and states that contribution plainly. The 2026 editorial's comparison of citations over time is instructive for authors deciding on fit: papers in the journal's top citation quartile accumulated citations steadily over one, five and ten years, which is the profile of work with a durable idea rather than a topical hook. Editors of such a journal are, predictably, sceptical of manuscripts whose entire claim is a small contextual replication — the same model, a new country, no new insight — and receptive to work that uses an Australasian or Asia-Pacific setting to say something the wider field needs to hear. Context should be a lens, not a limitation.

Special issues and themed sections play a regular part in the journal's life, as they do across SAGE marketing titles, and the online-first stream means accepted articles appear on the platform well before they are gathered into a quarterly issue. The journal publishes four issues a year in its volume pattern. Authors with a paper tied to a fast-moving digital topic should not assume a print-era delay; equally, authors should check the SAGE site for open special-issue calls, which offer a defined theme, guest editors and often a conference-linked community of fellow contributors.

Editorial Standards, Ethics and Peer Review

SAGE's submission guidelines for AMJ set the compliance baseline. The journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and SAGE directs authors to its publication-ethics policies and to the international standards for authors maintained by COPE, alongside requirements on disclosure — including, in SAGE's current guidance, appropriate disclosure of artificial-intelligence use and a list of prohibited uses. Manuscripts that do not conform to the guidelines may be returned before review. That single sentence should shape author behaviour: formatting, anonymisation for review, word limits, reference style, declarations of interest, ethics approvals for human research and data statements are not post-acceptance cosmetics but entry conditions.

The editorial office contacts named in SAGE's current guidelines are Paul Harrigan and Lara Stocchi, the same scholars who authored the 2026 development editorial — a useful sign of an engaged, research-active editorship that reports publicly on the journal's performance. As with any journal, editorships rotate, so confirm the current editor and any associate-editor structure on the SAGE masthead when you submit, and address pre-submission enquiries to the editorial office rather than to a past editor. Peer review follows the standard SAGE double-anonymised model for this title unless the current guidelines state otherwise; authors should prepare a properly anonymised manuscript file and a separate title page as instructed at the time of submission, because guideline details are updated and the version on the SAGE site governs.

For Australasian authors, one further standards point matters. Marketing research in Australia and New Zealand frequently involves human participants, consumer panels, social-media data and, increasingly, work with Indigenous communities and data. Ethics approval, consent, and culturally appropriate handling of Māori and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander data are substantive review issues, not paperwork. A manuscript that is silent on ethics where ethics are plainly engaged invites desk rejection at a COPE-member journal; a manuscript that addresses them directly and briefly earns reviewer confidence before the first result is read.

Metrics: Impact Factor, CiteScore and Quartiles — With Dates

Because several different numbers circulate for this journal, they are set out here with their sources and periods, and readers should prefer the most recent official figure for any decision. SAGE's journal pages currently display an Impact Factor of 3.8 and a five-year Impact Factor of 7.7. The editors' 2026 article reported, in its first comparison, a Journal Citation Reports impact factor of 4.0 with a five-year figure of 6.2 and a Journal Citation Indicator of 1.07, and a Scopus CiteScore of 14.9 with a Source Normalized Impact per Paper of 1.624 and an SJR of 1.557; in a second table, comparing ABDC A-rated marketing journals with figures last updated in January 2026, it listed AMJ at an impact factor of 3.8, five-year 7.7, CiteScore 13.1 and SJR 1.403. These are not contradictions to be averaged away; they are measurements from different releases and years, and the variation itself teaches the right lesson — quote the metric, the provider and the year together, or do not quote it at all.

SCImago's independent summary, reflected in secondary listings, gives the journal an SJR around 1.4, a best quartile of Q1, coverage in Scopus from 2003 to the present, and an h-index lower than the Journals World figure of 86, because h-indexes differ by database and date. The Google Scholar h5-index reported by the editors was 43, with an h5-median of 85. For an author, the operational conclusions are simpler than the arithmetic. AMJ is a Q1 marketing journal by SCImago's recent classification, it is Scopus-covered over two decades, it carries a solid and rising Journal Citation Reports impact factor for a regional title, and its articles are heavily downloaded. If your institution counts ABDC ratings, Scopus quartiles or a minimum impact factor, AMJ currently clears the bars that most Australasian business schools set for a strong marketing publication — but verify the current list, because the journal's own editors are the first to show how fast these tables change.

Publishing With SAGE: Process, Access and Charges

Submission is through SAGE's online system via the journal's page on the SAGE Journals platform, following the journal-specific submission guidelines hosted by SAGE. The guidelines cover manuscript preparation, how to submit, what happens after acceptance, and how to promote a published article through the SAGE Author Gateway, which offers resources on sharing and publicising work; SAGE Author Services separately offers optional paid support such as English-language editing and plagiarism checking. Those optional services are a publisher offering, not a condition of publication, and authors should never confuse them with an article processing charge.

AMJ operates principally as a subscription journal with an open-access option, in line with SAGE's hybrid model across its business list: articles can be published behind the subscription wall at no author charge, or made open access on payment of the applicable SAGE charge where an author or funder chooses or requires that route. Because the precise charge and any funder agreements change, this profile does not state a fixed open-access fee; check the SAGE page for the journal at submission, including whether your institution holds a read-and-publish agreement with SAGE that covers the charge, as many Australian and New Zealand universities do through their library consortia. What can be stated firmly is that choosing the subscription route does not disadvantage a paper in review: peer review precedes any access decision, and the journal's download figures show that SAGE platform access reaches a large professional readership in its own right.

After acceptance, SAGE's production process, online-first posting and issue assembly are efficient by the standards of quarterly journals, and authors receive the usual proofs and offprint and sharing provisions described in the guidelines. The complaints and appeals procedure is published by SAGE, and the journal follows SAGE's corrections and integrity policies — the unglamorous infrastructure that distinguishes a publisher-run journal from an outlet where an author has no recourse.

Making a Manuscript Competitive at AMJ

Lead with the contribution. The first review question at a Q1 marketing journal is what the field learns from your paper that it did not know before, and the introduction must answer it in the first page — for theory, for managers, and where relevant for policy or society. Australasian data strengthen a paper when the setting illuminates the phenomenon: market structure, culture, distance, regulation or Indigenous contexts that test or extend theory developed in North America or Europe. They weaken it when they are merely convenient. If the honest answer to 'why this setting?' is 'the data were available', expect that review.

Meet the field's evidentiary standards for your method. Consumer experiments need manipulation checks, adequate power and honest reporting of exclusions; survey studies need established scales, common-method safeguards and measurement validation; qualitative studies need a transparent sampling and coding account; conceptual papers need a genuine synthesis or a new framework, not a literature summary. Report effect sizes and limitations plainly. Sustainability and social-impact submissions — a visibly growing part of the journal's scope — must show marketing substance, not only good intentions: a consumption, branding, services or market mechanism must be doing the work.

Finally, write for two audiences at once, as the journal's founding purpose intended. The academic reader needs theory and rigour; the practitioner reader, who accounts for much of that large download traffic, needs the 'so what' in concrete terms. A short, honest managerial-implications section, free of inflated claims, serves the second audience without costing the first anything. Papers that achieve that balance are the ones a regional flagship exists to publish — and the ones, as its citation-over-time data show, that keep being read and cited for a decade.

Who Should Submit — and Who Should Not

Submit to AMJ if you have a marketing paper of international standard — consumer, services, digital, brand, strategy, retail, education or sustainability-focused — especially where Australasian or Asia-Pacific evidence, authors or questions are involved, and if a Q1, Scopus-covered, ABDC-recognised SAGE journal matches your institution's expectations. It is the natural first-choice regional journal for marketing academics in Australia and New Zealand and a credible choice for Asia-Pacific and international authors on its topics.

Look elsewhere if your paper is in accounting, finance, general management or another discipline outside marketing's borders, if it is a practitioner report without a research contribution, or if your timeline cannot accommodate full peer review at a selective journal. Those are scope and selectivity facts, not quality judgements, and a fast, accurate self-assessment saves the many months a mismatched submission consumes.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are AMJ's ISSNs?
Print ISSN 1441-3582 and online ISSN 1839-3349.

Who publishes the Australasian Marketing Journal?
SAGE Publishing (SAGE Publications), on the SAGE Journals platform.

What is AMJ's impact factor?
SAGE currently displays an Impact Factor of 3.8 and a five-year Impact Factor of 7.7. The editors' 2026 review reported figures from another release — 4.0 and 6.2 — illustrating why the year and source should always be quoted with the number.

Is AMJ a Q1 journal?
SCImago's recent classification places it in the first quartile (Q1) for Marketing and for Economics and Econometrics, with Scopus coverage from 2003 onward.

Is AMJ open access?
It is principally a subscription journal with an open-access publishing option under SAGE's model. Check the current SAGE page for charges and for institutional agreements that may cover them.

Who edits AMJ?
SAGE's current guidelines list Paul Harrigan and Lara Stocchi as the editorial-office contacts; they authored the journal's 2026 development editorial. Confirm the current masthead on SAGE before submitting.

Where do I submit?
Through the journal's page on the SAGE Journals platform, following the AMJ submission guidelines hosted by SAGE.

Summary

The Australasian Marketing Journal (ISSN 1441-3582 print, 1839-3349 online) has travelled from a Monash-published regional forum of the 1990s to a SAGE-published, Q1, Scopus-covered marketing journal with an impact factor displayed by SAGE at 3.8, a five-year figure of 7.7, a CiteScore reported by its editors in the low-to-mid teens depending on release, and hundreds of thousands of article downloads a year. Its scope spans the marketing discipline with a distinctive Australasian and Asia-Pacific centre of gravity and a growing sustainability strand, its standards are those of a COPE-member SAGE title, and its community is the ANZMAC-centred marketing academy. For marketing scholars with a genuine contribution — above all those whose work speaks from or to this region — AMJ is not a fallback regional option. On its current verified record, it is the region's leading marketing journal, and a competitive target in its own right.