International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work

About International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work

International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work — Journal Profile

International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work is the house journal of the narrative therapy movement: a peer-reviewed journal, produced by the Dulwich Centre in Adelaide, Australia, in which practitioners from around the world write up the ideas and practices that are inspiring their work. The Dulwich Centre states that the journal has been produced by Dulwich Centre Publications since 2002 and that it offers hopeful and creative ideas for counsellors, social workers, teachers, nurses, psychologists and community workers; in each issue, practitioners from a range of countries discuss the dilemmas they are grappling with and the issues most dear to their hearts, in writing the Centre describes as easy to read while remaining rigorous and thoughtful. The journal's current electronic ISSN is 2981-8818, the identifier recorded on this Journals World profile and in its Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) record, which names the Dulwich Centre Foundation of Australia as publisher and records open access from 2023. OpenAlex's source record for the journal links that new ISSN with the journal's earlier ISSN, 1446-5019, under which the long back catalogue appeared. For anyone who wants to understand how narrative practice actually develops — not in textbooks, but in consulting rooms, schools, hospitals and communities — this is the field's own record of itself.

At a Glance

• Full title: International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work
• Electronic ISSN: 2981-8818 (DOAJ)
• Earlier ISSN recorded by OpenAlex for the same source: 1446-5019
• Publisher: Dulwich Centre Foundation, Australia (DOAJ); produced by Dulwich Centre Publications since 2002 (Dulwich Centre)
• Country: Australia
• Open access: From 2023 (DOAJ); licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
• Article processing charge: None — DOAJ records that the journal has no APC and no other charges
• Language: English (DOAJ)
• Frequency: Published twice a year, on the equinoxes, in the publisher's current product descriptions
• Review model: DOAJ records editorial review among the journal's review processes, and the Centre maintains public peer review and editorial team pages
• Average publication time: 16 weeks (DOAJ)
• Keywords (DOAJ): narrative therapy, narrative practice, community work, social work, counselling, family therapy
• OpenAlex source: S2764560020, recording 616 works and 2,595 citations at the time of checking

History: From a Practice Movement to Its Own Journal

Narrative therapy was developed in the 1980s by Michael White, of the Dulwich Centre in Adelaide, and David Epston, in Auckland, New Zealand; their 1990 book gave the approach its canonical statement that problems are separate from people, and that people have skills, competencies, beliefs, values, commitments and abilities that can help them reduce the influence of problems in their lives. The Dulwich Centre became the approach's teaching home, and a journal was the natural next institution. The Centre's own history records that the International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work has been produced by Dulwich Centre Publications since 2002. For two decades it appeared under ISSN 1446-5019 as a subscription and print-era journal. In 2023, as DOAJ records, the journal became fully open access under its new electronic ISSN 2981-8818, published by the Dulwich Centre Foundation, with articles carrying DOIs and a Creative Commons licence. OpenAlex's yearly counts for the combined source show the journal publishing steadily in its open era — 38 works recorded for 2024, 32 for 2025 and 35 already for 2026 at the time of checking — alongside the deep back catalogue that explains the source's total of 616 works.

The journal's contents show why it matters beyond its own school. A recent issue discussed in the publisher's materials carries a special section marking the 20th anniversary of the Tree of Life, a narrative approach first developed with children in southern Africa that has since been adapted on several continents as a way of gathering stories of survival, kinship and hope. Other recent contributions range from a human-canine project with socially withdrawn young people in Hong Kong, to work drawing on critical race theory to make therapy spaces safer for Black neurodivergent people, to letter-writing practice in genetic counselling, to narrative practice in psychedelic-assisted therapy. That range — always practice-near, always written from inside the work — is the journal's signature.

The Dulwich Centre and the Publisher

The Dulwich Centre is the Adelaide institution founded around Michael White's work and continued after his death in 2008 as the international home of narrative therapy training, publishing and community projects. Its publishing arm produces the journal; its foundation is the publisher of record in DOAJ. The Centre also runs narrative training, hosts international conferences in narrative therapy and community work, and maintains practice resources and archives. This matters for the journal's character: it is not a commercial title that happens to cover narrative therapy, but the movement's own journal, edited from inside the community it serves, with an explicit editorial commitment — described in the aims and scope below — to publishing practitioners, including first-time authors, rather than only academics.

Aims and Scope

The journal's published aims and scope, maintained on the Dulwich Centre site, are unusually explicit, and prospective authors should read them as instructions rather than decoration. The Centre says it publishes content that opens space for conversation, engaging readers' own thoughtfulness and contributing to discussion within narrative therapy and community work. Contributions must be consistent with the founding principle that the person is not the problem, the problem is the problem — written, that is, from a non-pathologising stance and broadly congruent with the ideas of narrative practice. The journal takes explicit care with the politics of representation: wherever appropriate, anyone whose story or experience is represented should have a chance to read, view or listen to the representation and reflect on it, and the journal attends to representation in relation to gender, class, race, sexuality, culture, ability and age. It prioritises work of direct relevance to practitioners — descriptions of hopeful and helpful practice that give readers practical ideas — and it actively seeks new authors, supporting practitioners who have never published before, with a particular interest in young authors and in perspectives, communities and cultures generally under-represented in print. Finally, it aims to expand the thinking and parameters of narrative practice itself.

DOAJ's subject classification places the journal in communities and social welfare, and its keyword set — narrative therapy, narrative practice, community work, social work, counselling, family therapy — maps the territory. Multimedia contributions are contemplated alongside articles, and the journal's pages carry practice papers, explorations of metaphor and method (the Tree of Life, migration of identity, the absent but implicit), work with children and families, community and collective practice, responses to trauma, violence and colonisation, and reflective and theoretical pieces that stay close to practice.

Editorial Process and Peer Review

DOAJ's record for the journal lists editorial review among its review processes, together with the Centre's public peer review page and editorial team page, both linked from the DOAJ record; the Centre presents its review arrangements openly rather than leaving authors to guess. DOAJ records an average time from submission to publication of 16 weeks, which prospective authors can treat as the journal's stated planning figure at the time of checking, though individual manuscripts vary. The journal assigns DOIs to its articles — DOAJ records DOI as its persistent identifier scheme — and deposits and preservation arrangements recorded by DOAJ include services such as ProQuest, EBSCO and Informit, with the National Library of Australia named as its national library depository. Copyright, per DOAJ, is retained by authors, and articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which permits sharing with attribution for non-commercial purposes without adaptation. Authors should confirm the current licence and review wording on the journal's own open access page before submitting, since DOAJ records are a snapshot.

Metrics and Standing

OpenAlex's source record, resolved from ISSN 2981-8818 for this profile, gives the fullest available citation picture: 616 works, 2,595 citations, an h-index of 22 and an i10-index of 45, with a two-year mean citedness of 0.2 at the time of checking. Those totals span both ISSN eras of the journal, which is why they are much larger than the open access era alone could produce. OpenAlex's topic profile — counselling, therapy and family dynamics; psychotherapy techniques and applications; art therapy and mental health; counselling practices and supervision; child therapy and development — reflects a practitioner literature that is cited steadily by the counselling and social work fields rather than explosively. Readers used to biomedical journals should recalibrate: for a small, practitioner-written journal in a single therapeutic school, an h-index in the low twenties across two decades represents a genuinely used literature — the papers are the training material of a worldwide practice community. The older template text on this page quoted an h-index of 3, which appears to have counted only the new ISSN's first issues; the combined, attributed OpenAlex figures above are the fairer picture. No SCImago or Web of Science figure for the journal could be verified for this profile, and none is quoted.

Indexing and Access

The journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals under its electronic ISSN, with its listing created in 2025 and updated in 2026 in the record consulted — a listing that itself verifies the open access status, the licence, the absence of charges and the publisher identity quoted throughout this profile. Since 2023 the journal is free to read on the Dulwich Centre site, where current issues are posted in full and article PDFs carry the journal's licence statement and the Dulwich Centre Foundation imprint. DOAJ also records preservation and discovery through ProQuest, EBSCO and Informit services. The pre-2023 back catalogue, published under the earlier ISSN, has historically been reached through the Centre and through library aggregators; readers hunting a specific older paper should start with the journal's archive on the Dulwich Centre site and the aggregator services named above.

Fees, Licences and Open Access Terms

This is one of the simplest fee positions in scholarly publishing: DOAJ records that the journal has no article processing charge and no other charges, and its open access page is the authoritative statement of terms. Articles appear under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0: readers may share them with attribution, for non-commercial purposes, without making derivatives. Authors retain copyright, per DOAJ. There is no waiver policy recorded, because there is no charge to waive. Authors whose funders require a more permissive licence, such as CC BY, should raise that with the editorial office before submission, because the recorded licence is the journal's standard term and an exception cannot be assumed.

How to Submit

The journal maintains an information-for-authors page, linked from its DOAJ record, which is the authoritative route for submission mechanics, formatting and current deadlines; authors should follow it exactly, since submission channels change. The substance of a successful submission can be read off the journal's aims. Write about real practice, in the first person where that is honest, with enough concrete detail — questions asked, conversations held, documents produced — for another practitioner to adapt the work. Honour the representation rule: people whose stories appear should have seen and reflected on how they are represented, and the manuscript should show that this happened. Keep the stance non-pathologising and the language accessible; the journal's readers are practitioners across many countries, many writing and reading in English as an additional language. New authors are explicitly welcomed and supported, so a practitioner with strong practice and no publication record is precisely the author this journal exists to publish — the information-for-authors page and the editorial team page are the places to start a conversation with the editors.

The Community Work Half of the Title

Half of this journal's title is often overlooked. Community work is not an afterthought to the therapy: from its beginnings, narrative practice has treated collective and community settings — groups, schools, neighbourhoods, refugee communities, and communities living with the effects of war, colonisation and poverty — as primary sites of practice, and the journal is the main place where that collective practice is documented. The Tree of Life, whose twentieth anniversary a recent issue marked, is the best known example: a metaphor-based group approach in which participants draw their lives as trees, with roots, ground, trunk, branches, leaves and fruits standing for origins, daily life, skills, hopes, relationships and gifts, and in which storms stand for the hardships that affect whole forests rather than single trees. Developed first with children affected by HIV and conflict in southern Africa, it has been adapted by practitioners on several continents, and the journal's pages are where those adaptations are reported, compared and extended. The same pattern holds for collective narrative practice more generally: outsider-witness work, definitional ceremonies, community documents and local archives all circulate through this journal before they circulate anywhere else. A practitioner who wants to run such work well will find, in the back catalogue, both the original accounts and the honest reports of what happened when the ideas met a new context — including the dilemmas, which the Centre says its contributors write about openly. That documentary function, for community workers as much as for therapists, is what makes the journal more than a periodical: it is the practice memory of a movement.

Reading the Journal Well

New readers get the most from this journal by reading it as practitioners read it: for transferable moves rather than for findings. An article here typically earns its place by showing a conversation, a document, a question sequence or a community ritual in enough detail to be tried elsewhere, and by reflecting honestly on the ethics of the work — who was consulted, how stories were checked with the people they belong to, and what the practitioner would do differently. Reading several accounts of the same approach across different countries and settings is the journal's distinctive pleasure and its real evidence base: convergence and productive difference between settings are how this community tests its ideas. The open access era makes that reading free, which suits a journal whose authors and readers are often practitioners without university library access.

Who Reads It, and Who Should Write for It

The readership named by the publisher — counsellors, social workers, teachers, nurses, psychologists and community workers — is also the author base, which gives the journal its workshop character. It should be a first reading choice for trainees in narrative therapy, for supervisors looking for practice material, and for community workers in schools, hospitals, refugee and settlement services, child protection and family services who use narrative ideas. Researchers from adjacent fields will find it the primary source for how narrative concepts are actually operationalised, as distinct from how they are summarised in handbooks. If your work is a randomised trial or a psychometric study, this is the wrong venue; if your work is a careful, ethically considered account of practice that others could learn from, it may be exactly the right one.

Similar and Related Journals

Practitioners comparing venues often look at the Journal of Systemic Therapies, which covers family and systemic practice more broadly; at Family Process, the long-established, more research-oriented journal of family therapy; at the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Family Therapy, the regional journal closest in spirit and geography; and at social work titles such as Australian Social Work for community practice with a policy edge. Each differs in stance: this journal is the only one of the group that is constitutively narrative — its non-pathologising principle and representation ethics are conditions of publication, not preferences — and the only one published by the founding institution of its own approach.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the journal's ISSN? Its current electronic ISSN is 2981-8818 (DOAJ). OpenAlex records the earlier ISSN 1446-5019 for the same source, covering the pre-2023 catalogue.

Who publishes it? The Dulwich Centre Foundation in Australia, per DOAJ; the Dulwich Centre states the journal has been produced by Dulwich Centre Publications since 2002.

Is it open access? Yes, from 2023, per DOAJ, under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence, with authors retaining copyright.

Does it charge authors? No. DOAJ records no article processing charge and no other charges.

How often does it appear? The publisher's current descriptions say twice a year, on the equinoxes.

What are its metrics? OpenAlex recorded 616 works, 2,595 citations and an h-index of 22 at the time of checking; those figures cover both ISSN eras of the journal.

Can first-time authors publish here? Yes — the aims and scope explicitly seek new authors and describe editorial support, encouragement and collaboration for practitioners who have not published before.

Verdict

The International Journal of Narrative Therapy and Community Work is a small journal with an outsized role: it is where a worldwide practice community writes down what it is learning. Its verified facts are attractive — open access since 2023, no charges, authors retaining copyright, a DOAJ listing, and a two-decade back catalogue with a respectable attributed citation record — but its real distinction is editorial: a non-pathologising stance, an ethics of representation, and an open door to practitioner authors. For counsellors, social workers and community workers shaped by narrative ideas, it is both a reading habit and a realistic first publication venue.