About Convergence The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

Convergence is an international, peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by SAGE Publishing, devoted to research into new media technologies and to the social, cultural, political and creative consequences of media change. Its full title — Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies — describes both its object of study and its method. The journal examines what happens when previously separate media, industries, technologies and audience practices come together, and it does so from a deliberately interdisciplinary position, publishing work rooted in media studies, communication, cultural studies, sociology and technology studies, as well as contributions from researchers working in film, games, journalism, design and related fields. The record held on this site, under the long form of the title, carries print ISSN 1354-8565 and online ISSN 1748-7382, and lists SAGE Publishing as publisher — identifiers that match the journal as presented in Scopus and SCImago listings. Coverage in those listings begins in 1995, the year the journal was founded, and continues to the present.

Understanding Convergence matters because the word in its title names one of the defining processes of contemporary media life. When the journal began in the mid-1990s, digitisation was beginning to blur the boundaries between broadcasting, publishing, telecommunications and computing. Three decades later, that blurring is the ordinary condition of media: a television programme is also a stream, a social conversation, a game tie-in and a data trail; a newspaper story is also a podcast, a video and a set of platform metrics. A journal that has tracked that transformation continuously, in peer-reviewed form, since 1995 is therefore both a research venue and, read over time, an archive of how scholars have understood each successive wave of new media — the web, social platforms, mobile media, streaming, and now algorithmic systems and artificial intelligence.

Quick facts

Where a detail that researchers often ask about — for example a current acceptance rate or a guaranteed time to first decision — is not publicly disclosed by the publisher in a stable form, this profile says so rather than repeating figures from unofficial aggregator sites. Journal-level metrics such as CiteScore, SCImago Journal Rank and any Journal Impact Factor quoted for the journal change every year, are produced by different providers on different citation windows, and should always be read on the provider's own current page for the year in question, not copied from a directory entry written in an earlier year.

History and development

Convergence was founded in 1995, at a moment when the commercial web was new and when academic media studies was reorienting itself around digital technologies. Its founding premise, visible in its subtitle, was that new media technologies needed a dedicated research journal of their own — one that would not treat digital media as a footnote to broadcasting or print, but as a field in which technology, industry, text and audience all had to be studied together. That premise aged well. Through the late 1990s the journal published on early online culture, multimedia and interactive forms. Through the 2000s its pages followed the rise of participatory culture, fandom online, mobile telephony, social networking and user-generated content. A frequently cited illustration of that period is the journal's 2008 issue, which carried Daren Brabham's introduction to crowdsourcing as a model for problem solving and danah boyd's analysis of Facebook's privacy controversy around its News Feed launch — two papers, published side by side, that show the journal's range from production models to platform politics.

In the 2010s the journal's concerns widened with the field itself: platformisation, datafication, streaming television, games and play, digital labour, and the reorganisation of journalism and the creative industries around platforms. In the 2020s its calls for papers and published work have continued to move with the research frontier; at the time this profile was researched, SAGE's journal homepage was promoting special-issue calls on topics including resisting the infrastructuralisation of artificial intelligence, algorithmic sociality, cybersecurity and utopian media studies. Those calls are evidence of direction rather than promises about any single future issue, and prospective authors should read the current call text on the SAGE site before preparing a submission for a themed collection.

The journal's publishing home is SAGE, one of the largest independent academic publishers in the social sciences and humanities. Under SAGE, the journal appears in both print and online form, is sold to libraries internationally as part of SAGE journal collections, and benefits from the publisher's standard infrastructure for online-first publication, reference linking and indexing deposits. Bibliographic listings differ in how they state the publisher's country — SAGE operates from both the United Kingdom and the United States, and some listings give a United States address while SCImago gives the United Kingdom — so the country line in a secondary listing should not be treated as a contradiction of the SAGE imprint itself.

Aims and scope in depth

Media convergence as an object of study

The journal's central concern is convergence in its several senses: technological convergence, in which devices and networks absorb functions that once belonged to separate machines; industrial convergence, in which media, technology and telecommunications companies merge, partner and compete across old sector boundaries; textual convergence, often discussed as transmedia storytelling, in which stories and brands are designed to travel across platforms; and cultural convergence, in which audiences move content between platforms, remake it, and organise communities around it. Articles in the journal may take any one of those senses as their focus, but the strongest contributions usually show how several operate together in a concrete case — a platform, a programme, a game, a newsroom, a fandom or a policy fight.

Digital media and society

A second large strand concerns the socio-cultural implications of digital media: how platforms shape behaviour, identity and community; how visibility and privacy are negotiated in public-by-default environments; and how digital media reorganise everyday life, from parenting and intimacy to work and leisure. Work in this strand is frequently theoretical as well as empirical, and the journal has a long-standing openness to critical and interpretive approaches alongside survey, interview, ethnographic and computational methods.

Politics, power and platforms

Political dimensions of new media form a third strand: digital mobilisation and activism, the role of platforms in elections and protest, regulation and governance of online communication, and the dynamics of power inside platform companies and states. Contributions here typically engage questions of who controls infrastructures, who is made visible or invisible by algorithmic systems, and how policy responds — or fails to respond — to concentrated platform power.

Creative industries, production and labour

The journal also publishes extensively on media production: how creative work is organised in converged industries, how professional identities in journalism, television, film, games and music are being remade, and how audiences' unpaid or low-paid activity — sharing, modding, commenting, creating — fits into media business models. Fandom and community formation, listed among the journal's recurring themes in secondary scope summaries, belong naturally in this strand as well as in the society strand, because fan communities are simultaneously audiences, producers and markets.

Methods and interdisciplinarity

Scope summaries of the journal consistently emphasise interdisciplinary method, and the published record supports that description. A single volume may contain a textual analysis of a streaming drama, an ethnography of a creator community, a political-economic account of a platform's business model, and a theoretical essay rethinking a core concept such as participation, liveness or remediation. Authors submitting to the journal should therefore expect to be read by scholars outside their home subfield, and should define specialised terms, situate their case for non-specialist readers, and make the wider implication of a local study explicit.

What the journal publishes

The core of each issue is original research articles, peer reviewed and published first online through SAGE before collection into issues. Alongside research articles, the journal's history includes editorial introductions to special issues, review articles and book reviews — the 2008 issue cited above, for example, contained both research articles and short review pieces. Special issues and themed sections are a significant part of the journal's identity: guest-edited collections allow a fast-moving topic, such as a new platform form or a new regulatory moment, to be treated from several angles at once, and the journal's homepage regularly advertises calls for such collections. Prospective guest editors and contributors should treat the homepage call, with its named editors, deadlines and submission route, as the authoritative document; deadlines in a call are fixed by the call itself and are not extended by anything written in a directory profile.

Length, referencing style, anonymisation requirements and other mechanical rules for submission are set out in SAGE's manuscript submission guidelines for the journal and can change. Rather than copying a possibly outdated word limit into this profile, authors are directed to read the current guidelines on the SAGE journal site on the day they submit, to prepare the manuscript in the journal's required style, and to check questions of open-access funding, permissions for third-party material and data statements against the publisher's current instructions.

Peer review and editorial standards

Convergence is a refereed journal. SAGE's description of publishing in the journal promises rigorous peer review, prompt publishing and a multidisciplinary audience, and the journal operates within SAGE's standard editorial framework: submissions are screened editorially for fit and quality, sent for external review where appropriate, and decided on the basis of reviewers' reports and editorial judgement. As with any selective international journal, fit with the stated scope is a real criterion and not a formality — a technically competent media paper whose connection to new media technologies and convergence is thin is unlikely to survive editorial screening, however strong it may be for a more general or a more specialised outlet. Authors can improve their chances by naming the conversation in the journal to which they are contributing, citing recent Convergence work where it is genuinely relevant, and framing the contribution at the level of the field rather than only the case.

Ethical expectations follow the publisher's policies on originality, authorship, conflicts of interest, image and data integrity, and the responsible use of material gathered from online communities — a point of particular sensitivity for this journal's subject matter, since its authors routinely quote, screenshot and analyse posts by ordinary users. Researchers planning work on fandoms, closed groups or vulnerable communities should address consent, anonymisation and platform terms in the manuscript itself, and expect editors and reviewers to ask about them.

Indexing, metrics and how to read them

The journal is indexed in Scopus, with coverage from 1995 in SCImago's listing, and SCImago classifies it in Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous) and in Communication. In the SCImago data summarised by secondary services at the time of research, the journal stood in the first quartile (Q1) in both of those categories, with a SCImago Journal Rank a little above 1.0 and an h-index in the sixties. Those numbers are a snapshot, not a permanent property: SJR, quartile and h-index are recalculated annually, quartiles depend on the performance of every other journal in the category, and the h-index by construction only moves in one direction. The correct use of such figures is comparative and contextual — to confirm that the journal is an established, well-cited venue in communication and media studies — rather than as a promise about any individual article's citations.

Similarly, citation-based scores published by Scopus (CiteScore) and any Journal Impact Factor published through Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports are separate products with separate windows and denominators, and a figure quoted without its year and provider is meaningless. Researchers who need a metric for a tenure, promotion or reporting file should take it directly from the provider for the required year and record the source and date. What can be said without a year attached, and what the long citation record of papers such as the crowdsourcing and Facebook articles shows, is that the journal has published work that the wider field continues to cite heavily, across media studies and into management, sociology and information research.

Access and readership

Convergence is primarily a subscription journal. Most readers encounter it through a university or institutional library subscription to SAGE journals, which provides access to the full archive back to the 1990s. Individual articles may be openly accessible where the author has taken an open-access route or a funder mandate applies; the licence shown on the article page governs reuse. Some material, such as editorials, has historically been made free to read. Readers without institutional access should check the article page for a free version, look for an accepted manuscript in the author's institutional repository, or request the work through interlibrary services, rather than assuming that a paywall means the work is unobtainable.

The readership is international and cross-disciplinary in a way that matters for how articles are written and found. Media and communication departments are the core audience, but the journal is also read in cultural studies, sociology, film and television studies, game studies, journalism studies, science and technology studies and information schools. That breadth explains both the journal's citation reach and its editorial insistence that specialist work be legible across subfields.

Guidance for prospective authors

First, test fit honestly. Ask whether the paper is about new media technologies or the processes of convergence — and whether that aboutness is in the argument, not only in the choice of case. Second, engage the journal's own archive: a literature review that ignores a decade of directly relevant Convergence articles signals a poor fit to editors and reviewers. Third, make the theoretical or conceptual contribution explicit; the journal values empirical novelty, but case studies are expected to travel — to refine a concept, challenge an assumption or open a comparison. Fourth, handle evidence from platforms carefully, describing data collection, sampling and ethics in reproducible detail. Fifth, write for the multidisciplinary reader: define terms, avoid unexplained abbreviations, and summarise platform mechanics that readers in another country or subfield may not know. Finally, follow the current SAGE submission instructions exactly — anonymisation, abstract and keyword requirements, reference style, declarations and supplementary-material rules — since manuscripts can be returned unreviewed for formal non-compliance at any selective journal.

Authors considering a special issue should read the live calls on the journal homepage, note which calls ask for abstracts first and which ask for full papers, and observe the stated deadlines; at the time of research the homepage featured calls on artificial-intelligence infrastructures, algorithmic sociality, cybersecurity and utopian media studies, each with its own timetable in 2026. A directory profile cannot hold a place in any of those collections; only a timely submission through the route named in the call can do that.

Distinctions and similar titles

Convergence should not be confused with Convergencia, the Mexican social-sciences journal published by the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, whose ISSN and publisher are entirely different, nor with the many conference proceedings, magazines and book titles that use the single word “Convergence” for subjects from mathematics to adult education. When citing or searching, the combination of subtitle, SAGE imprint and ISSN 1354-8565 / 1748-7382 identifies this journal unambiguously. In reference lists the journal is commonly abbreviated in forms derived from its title, and its articles carry DOIs under SAGE's 10.1177 prefix, with the journal code visible in SAGE URLs.

Verification checklist

Readers verifying this record should confirm: the title and subtitle as given above; the two ISSNs, 1354-8565 in print and 1748-7382 online; the publisher as SAGE; and the journal homepage on the SAGE journals platform, where current editors, calls, guidelines and the latest issue are listed. If a third-party site attributes the journal to a different publisher, quotes an ISSN outside that pair, or promises a publication fee or decision timetable that the SAGE site does not state, the third-party site — not this profile — should be treated as unreliable, and the publisher's page should prevail. Information about article charges, open-access options and subscription prices is set by the publisher and is not publicly disclosed in this profile beyond the access description above, because such terms change and must be checked at source.

Frequently asked questions

Is Convergence peer reviewed? Yes. It is a refereed SAGE journal, and SAGE promotes rigorous peer review as part of its offer to authors of this title.

Is Convergence the same journal as Convergencia? No. They are different journals, in different countries, with different publishers, languages of primary readership and ISSNs.

When did Convergence begin? Coverage begins in 1995, the journal's founding year, and it has published continuously since.

Does the journal publish special issues? Yes. Themed collections with guest editors and public calls for papers are a regular feature, advertised on the SAGE journal homepage.

Is the journal open access? It is a subscription journal in which individual articles can be open access; check the licence on the specific article page. A single journal-level label does not describe every article.

Where should I submit? Through the submission route named in SAGE's current guidelines for the journal, or through the specific call for a special issue. Do not submit through any directory or third-party site.

Sources and basis of this profile

This profile is based on the journal's presentation on the SAGE journals platform, including its homepage calls and published article record; on Scopus and SCImago listing data for the journal's ISSNs, coverage and categories as summarised at the time of research; and on the journal's own published archive, including its 2008 issue. Metrics are described as time-bound snapshots for the reasons explained above. No fact in this profile relies on an unofficial submission-service or metrics-aggregator site, and any figure needed for a formal purpose should be re-verified with its provider.