Journal of International Special Needs Education

About Journal of International Special Needs Education

Journal of International Special Needs Education — A Full Profile

The Journal of International Special Needs Education (JISNE) is the scholarly journal of the Division of International Special Education and Services (DISES), a division of the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) in the United States. Its purpose, as the journal states it, is to provide DISES members and members of the international scientific community with information that reflects the field of special education around the world. It is a multidisciplinary journal for reporting original and theoretical contributions concerning disability and the delivery of special education programmes and services to individuals with disabilities throughout the world. Where most special education journals are anchored in a single national system — its laws, its funding rules, its categories — JISNE is anchored in the comparison between systems, and in the experience of countries building, reforming or extending provision for disabled children and adults. That international remit has defined the journal since its first volumes in the late 1990s.

One correction belongs at the front of this profile. The short directory record that previously appeared on this page named the publisher as a bare number and described the journal's subject only as a quartile label. A number is not a publisher, and a quartile is not a subject. The publisher of record is the Division of International Special Education and Services, the international division of the Council for Exceptional Children, confirmed by the CEC's own division listings, which state that DISES members receive the Journal of International Special Needs Education, by DISES's own site, and by SCImago-derived directory data naming the same body as publisher. The journal's field is special education and disability services in international and comparative perspective, as set out in the scope section below.

At a Glance

History and Identity

JISNE grew out of the international work of the Council for Exceptional Children. The CEC, founded in the United States in 1922, built a network of specialist divisions, and its international division — the Division of International Special Education and Services — exists to promote knowledge exchange, collaboration, human rights and advocacy for those who provide services for individuals with disabilities, to promote international communication, cooperation and progress in education and services for children who have disabilities and gifts and talents, and to serve as a catalyst for the international exchange of special education practice. A division with that mission needed a journal, and the Journal of International Special Needs Education is that journal: the division's own listings confirm that members receive it as part of their membership.

The journal's early volumes date from the late 1990s. A 1998 article on special education in Mexico is cited from volume 1 of the journal, published from the Council for Exceptional Children's headquarters in Reston, Virginia, and the ERIC database indexes journal content from volume 4, published in 2001, including a survey of international special education topics ranging from a BrailleNote project in British Columbia to a Swedish programme supporting Romanian children with special needs, a visual resource room in New Zealand, and technology programmes in European countries. That single contents list captures the journal's enduring pattern: country-grounded reports, written by scholars who know the system they describe, placed side by side so that readers can compare approaches across very different national contexts. Volume numbering has continued annually since; volume 27 appeared in 2024, published in two issues, with articles carrying DOIs under the 10.9782 prefix.

The OpenAlex source record for the journal (source S4210174228, resolved through the ISSN endpoint for ISSN 2159-4341) records works from 2001 through 2025. That start date reflects the coverage of the databases feeding OpenAlex rather than the journal's founding — the late-1990s volumes predate it — and similar gaps explain the patchy coverage spans (2013, then 2019–2025) carried in SCImago-derived directory data. Readers tracing the journal's full back run should work from the journal's own archive rather than from any single index's coverage statement.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The journal's stated scope is deliberately wide in geography and deliberately focused in subject. It reports original and theoretical contributions concerning disability and the delivery of special education programmes and services to individuals with disabilities throughout the world. In practice, its pages carry empirical studies of teaching and intervention in particular countries; comparative analyses of policy, law and provision across countries; accounts of how inclusive education is being built in systems where it is new; studies of teacher preparation for special and inclusive education in different national contexts; and work on identification, assessment and family experience of disability across cultures. Recent articles illustrate the range: a 2024 study of teacher attitudes and perceptions of inclusive education in Ghana, and a companion piece on how pedagogues support inclusion in Denmark — two systems at very different stages of resourcing and reform, examined in the same volume. A two-part history of international engagement in the Council for Exceptional Children since 1980, published in the same volume, shows the journal also serves as a record of its own professional community.

OpenAlex's topic classification of the journal's output, checked in October 2025, matches that scope closely. Its leading topics for JISNE are collaborative teaching and inclusion; behavioural and psychological studies; inclusion and disability in education and sport; inclusive education and diversity; and disability rights and representation. Authors should note what that distribution implies editorially: the journal's centre of gravity is inclusive education as practised and governed in real systems, with disability rights framing much of the discussion, rather than clinical or laboratory studies of impairment, which belong in medical or psychological journals.

The Owning Division: DISES

Because JISNE is a society journal, its identity cannot be separated from its owning division. DISES states its mission as promoting knowledge exchange, collaboration, human rights and advocacy for those who provide services for individuals with disabilities, and its strategic goals are to promote the quest for knowledge in international special needs education to improve the well-being of children and youth with disabilities; to foster dissemination of that knowledge; to strengthen collaborative partnerships in the field; and to promote advocacy for the human rights of all children and youth with disabilities. The journal is the division's principal scholarly channel for the first two of those goals, and its contents — country studies, comparative work and practice reports from systems at every income level — are how the division's worldwide membership talks to itself. DISES members receive the journal and the DISES newsletter, per the Council for Exceptional Children's division listings.

Editorial Information

Society journals of this size are run by working academics in the field, and JISNE is no exception. University faculty pages record that Dr Kelly Brown Kearney of Florida Atlantic University has served as the journal's Managing Editor, while also editing the DADD Express for a sister CEC division, and that Dr Angela Stone-MacDonald served as an Associate Editor of the journal from 2017, alongside a reviewing role dating to 2011. The journal also draws on an international scientific committee and reviewer pool: published curricula vitae of committee members describe the journal in the same terms as its own purpose statement and record reviewing service for DISES–CEC reaching back more than a decade. Editorial personnel change over time, and the journal's own website — which was not directly retrievable at the time of checking for this profile — is the authoritative source for the current masthead; authors should confirm the sitting editor and managing editor there before directing queries. What can be stated with confidence is the model: a small editorial team drawn from the international special education community, supported by reviewers whose expertise is country- and topic-specific, which is what a journal publishing single-country studies from every continent requires.

Metrics and Standing

Figures here are attributed to their sources and checking date, because this journal's small size makes database differences unusually visible. OpenAlex (source S4210174228, checked October 2025) records 164 works and 1,090 citations, an h-index of 16, an i10-index of 34, and a two-year mean citedness of about 1.28. The short record previously on this page carried an h-index of 7, and SCImago-derived listings likewise report an h-index of 7 with an SJR of about 0.20 — the discrepancy arises because Scopus-based counting captures only part of this journal's run (SCImago-derived coverage spans are fragmentary: 2013 and 2019–2025, with one secondary listing showing only 2020–2021), while OpenAlex draws on wider sources. Neither figure is a misprint; they are different instruments measuring different slices of the journal's life, and this profile reports both rather than silently choosing one. Secondary SCImago-derived listings place the journal in the third or fourth quartile for Education depending on year and category. For a society journal whose purpose is communication within a worldwide practitioner-scholar community, raw citation rank is a partial measure at best; the journal's real standing is as one of very few venues devoted specifically to special education outside the author's own country.

Indexing and Access

The journal's presence in SCImago's listings reflects coverage in Scopus for the spans noted above, and its earlier content is indexed in ERIC, the education database, which carries records for journal articles from at least 2001 with the Council for Exceptional Children, Reston, Virginia, named as publisher of record. A search of the DOAJ database by ISSN, carried out for this profile in October 2025, returned no record for either ISSN, so no DOAJ listing is claimed; the journal is distributed to DISES members as a membership benefit and through its publisher's platform, and it should be treated as a subscription and membership journal. Article charges could not be verified from a publisher source fetched for this profile and are not stated here; authors should confirm the journal's current terms on its own website.

How to Submit and Who Should Write for It

JISNE invites the kinds of contributions its purpose statement describes: original research and theoretical work concerning disability and the delivery of special education programmes and services, written for an international readership. The practical test an author should apply before submitting is the comparative one. A study of a single classroom, school or district, written only for readers inside its own system, is a weak fit; the same study framed so that readers in other countries can understand the system's structure, the policy context and what transfers across borders is exactly the journal's material. Country reports should name the laws, categories and funding arrangements they discuss rather than assuming them; comparative papers should compare like with like; and practice descriptions should be honest about resourcing, because the journal's readers include scholars and officials in systems where provision is still being built. Submissions are made through the journal's own channels as directed on its website, and prospective authors — especially those writing about their own national system for the first time — are encouraged to read a recent volume's country studies as models of the expected framing.

Is This Journal Right for Your Paper?

Choose JISNE if your work concerns special education, disability or inclusion in a specific country or across countries, and if the audience you most want is the international community of special education scholars, teacher educators and policy-facing practitioners gathered in DISES and the CEC. The journal is a particularly apt home for research from under-represented systems, where a well-documented country study is itself a contribution to the record. It is a weaker fit for intervention studies whose interest is purely clinical, for single-system work with no international framing, and for authors who need the rapid turnaround or the citation profile of a large commercial journal. Its two-issue annual rhythm and society-journal scale mean a slower, more community-paced conversation — one in which a paper is read by precisely the people positioned to act on it in other countries.

Themes and Article Types

Across its volumes, several recurring themes organise the journal's contents. The first is inclusive education in transition: studies of systems moving disabled learners from segregated provision into mainstream schools, and of the teacher attitudes, preparation and resourcing on which that move succeeds or stalls — the 2024 Ghana study of teacher attitudes and the Danish study of pedagogue support for inclusion are recent instances from opposite ends of the resourcing spectrum. The second theme is policy and rights: how national laws and international commitments, including the rights framework that DISES itself advocates, are translated into categories, entitlements and services on the ground. The third is professional preparation: how teachers, pedagogues and specialists are trained for special and inclusive education in different systems, and what competencies that training builds. The fourth is family and community experience of disability, reported from cultural contexts that Anglophone journals reach less often. The fifth is the history and organisation of the field itself, including the journal's own professional lineage within the Council for Exceptional Children.

The article types follow from those themes: empirical research articles reporting studies conducted in one or more named countries; theoretical and conceptual papers that frame questions comparatively; country and programme reports that document provision, law and practice for an international audience; and review or historical pieces that synthesise a system or a movement. What unifies them is the expectation of context. Every contribution is expected to make its setting intelligible to a reader on another continent — naming the governing law, the service structure and the population served — because the journal's whole value lies in allowing a reader in one system to learn, accurately, from another. Authors who supply that context generously, and who state plainly what in their findings is local and what might travel, are writing in the journal's house style whether or not they have seen it named as such.

Similar Journals

Authors comparing venues for international special education work commonly also consider the European Journal of Special Needs Education, which approaches similar questions from a largely European base; the International Journal of Special Education, a separate and unrelated open-access title with which JISNE is sometimes confused; and the CEC's other journals, including Exceptional Children and TEACHING Exceptional Children, which are United States-focused. The distinctions matter: JISNE's defining feature is its worldwide, division-owned, membership-distributed character.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of the Journal of International Special Needs Education? The print ISSN is 2159-4341 and the online ISSN is 2331-4001, as recorded in the OpenAlex source record and SCImago-derived listings.

Who publishes the journal? The Division of International Special Education and Services (DISES), a division of the Council for Exceptional Children in the United States. The bare number shown in the older directory record was a data error, flagged for the corrections pass.

What does the journal publish? Original and theoretical contributions concerning disability and the delivery of special education programmes and services to individuals with disabilities throughout the world, per its stated purpose.

How long has the journal existed? Its first volumes appeared in the late 1990s (volume 1 is cited from 1998, and ERIC indexes volume 4 from 2001); volume 27 appeared in 2024 in two issues.

What are its citation metrics? OpenAlex, checked in October 2025, records 164 works, 1,090 citations and an h-index of 16; SCImago-derived data report an h-index of 7 over a more fragmentary coverage span. The two figures measure different coverage and are both reported in the metrics section above.

Is the journal open access? No DOAJ record was found for either ISSN in October 2025; the journal reaches readers chiefly through DISES membership and its publisher's platform.