Migration Studies

About Migration Studies

History and Development of Migration Studies

Migration Studies is a peer-reviewed, online-only journal published by Oxford University Press. It was launched in March 2013 by a group of migration scholars led by Professor Alan Gamlen, who became its founding Editor-in-Chief (a role he held from 2010, through the journal's planning and launch phase, until 2020, according to his official Australian National University profile). Writing in the COMPAS (Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, University of Oxford) blog shortly after the launch, Gamlen recalled that the founders had "been working hard on the concept for over a year" before the March 2013 launch, and that the journal was conceived as a new, field-consolidating outlet at a time when migration research was scattered across disciplinary journals.

The journal's gamble paid off. Although it began life awaiting its first Social Science Citation Index listing — with OUP estimating an impact factor by the official methodology that, as Gamlen noted at the time, would have placed it above the established migration journals — Migration Studies is now firmly established in the top tier of its field. Its volume numbering confirms the 2013 founding: volume 14 was published in 2026. Oxford University Press publishes the journal quarterly, with each volume comprising four issues plus occasional thematic special issues.

From the outset the journal positioned itself as a consolidating force for migration research as a field in its own right. The OUP "Publish with us" page describes its mission as "developing the core concepts that link different disciplinary perspectives on migration" and "encouraging the consolidation of this wide-ranging field of research" — an ambition that distinguishes it from older journals rooted in single disciplines such as demography, sociology, or geography.

Aims and Scope

Migration Studies is, in OUP's official description, "a peer-reviewed, online-only journal dedicated to advancing the understanding of human mobility in all its forms." The journal welcomes research on the drivers, processes, and consequences of migration — whether voluntary or forced, internal or international, historical or contemporary.

Its disciplinary scope is deliberately broad: the journal publishes work from across the social sciences and related disciplines, including sociology, political science, geography, economics, anthropology, and international development. This interdisciplinarity is central to its identity — the journal explicitly aims to build the conceptual bridges between disciplinary approaches to migration rather than serving any single one.

OUP states that the journal is especially interested in contributions offering theoretical innovation, comparative insight, or methodological advancement. Submissions grounded in a single case or context must demonstrate broader analytical relevance and engage actively with conceptual or theoretical debates in migration studies. The journal is explicit about what it does not want: manuscripts primarily focused on policy analysis and evaluation, or lacking a clear contribution to wider scholarly conversations, are "unlikely to be successful." Priority is given to methodological, comparative, and theoretical advances.

The journal publishes original research articles (up to 10,000 words excluding abstract, references, and supplementary materials), research notes, reviews of books, films, and other media, and thematic special issues proposed through annual calls coordinated by the Deputy Editor.

Editorial Leadership

Professor Alan Gamlen — now Director of the ANU Migration Hub and Professor in the School of Regulation and Global Governance at the Australian National University — was the founding Editor-in-Chief of Migration Studies (2010–2020), leading the journal from conception through its first seven volumes. Gamlen, a New Zealander who received his DPhil from Oxford, is a leading scholar of diaspora engagement and the international politics of migration, and his stewardship gave the journal its field-consolidating orientation.

Professor Maria Koinova serves as Deputy Editor and coordinates the journal's annual calls for thematic special issue proposals — a central part of the journal's publishing programme, with special issues published regularly on agenda-setting themes (a recent example being the 2026 special issue on "Mobile temporalities and political possibilities," expanding the temporal turn in migration studies).

The journal operates a partial triple-anonymized review model to support fairness and transparency: all submissions are initially assessed anonymously by the editorial team without access to author names or affiliations, and manuscripts sent for external review move to a double-anonymized model in which reviewers and authors do not know each other's identities (editor access to identities is limited to conflict-of-interest management).

Note on verification: the OUP journal page names the Deputy Editor but does not name a current Editor-in-Chief on the pages accessible during this research. The leadership facts stated here are drawn from OUP's official pages and Professor Gamlen's official ANU profile. Readers should consult the OUP journal page for the full, current masthead.

Journal Metrics

Unlike many journals, Migration Studies publishes an unusually rich set of official metrics directly on its OUP journal page, alongside an annual report on journal operations. All figures below are from the journal's official Oxford Academic page (2025 metrics):

• Clarivate Journal Impact Factor (2025): 2.8
• 5-year Impact Factor (2025): 3.5
• Immediacy Index (2025): 0.8
• Eigenfactor Score (2025): 0.00228
• Article Influence Score (2025): 1.268
• Scopus CiteScore (2025): 3.9; ranked 31 of 140 journals in the Demography category by CiteScore
• SNIP (Source Normalized Impact per Paper, 2025): 2.21
• Acceptance rate: approximately 10%
• Speed: average of 16 days from submission to first decision for all papers (including desk decisions); 101 days from submission to first post-review decision; 34 days from acceptance to online publication (Q1 2024 figures)
• Readership: 159,956 full-text uses in 2025

Cross-verification: the independent aggregator OOIR independently reports a Web of Science-based impact factor of 2.800 for the journal, consistent with OUP's official 2.8 figure. Resurchify's Scopus-based "Impact IF" of 2.63 for 2024 is a different, Scopus-derived metric and should not be confused with the Clarivate Journal Impact Factor. In OOIR's Demography ranking the journal sits at #7 of 24 journals (Q2 in that particular ranking scheme) — a useful reminder that quartile labels vary by database and category definition.

Open Access and Article Processing Charges

Migration Studies is not a fully open-access journal: it is not listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (checked 12 October 2026), and OpenAlex does not mark it as fully open access. It operates a hybrid model — the standard route is subscription publication, with open access available through Oxford University Press's Oxford Open programme.

Article processing charge: OpenAlex records a reported OA list price of €3,952 (sourced, per OpenAlex, from DOAJ data — although DOAJ itself currently returns no record for this journal's ISSNs, an inconsistency readers should be aware of). No per-journal APC figure was published on an accessible OUP page during this research. OUP's charges vary by journal and are affected by institutional Read & Publish agreements, developing-country discounts, and waiver programmes. This profile therefore does not quote a definitive APC; authors should confirm the current charge, taxes, and waiver eligibility directly with Oxford University Press before submitting.

Abstracting and Indexing

Migration Studies is indexed in the major citation databases. Its Clarivate Journal Impact Factor and Demography category listing confirm coverage in the Web of Science (Social Sciences Citation Index), and its Scopus CiteScore and SNIP confirm indexing in Scopus. The journal's ISSNs are 2049-5838 (print) and 2049-5846 (online). Authors with funder or institutional indexing mandates should verify current coverage at the time of submission.

Landmark Papers

The following are among the most-cited papers ever published in Migration Studies, ranked by citation counts recorded in Crossref (all DOIs verified as resolving on 12 October 2026):

• Francesc Ortega and Giovanni Peri (2013), "The effect of income and immigration policies on international migration." DOI: 10.1093/migration/mns004. Published in the journal's inaugural year and its most-cited paper (over 380 citations in Crossref), this article examines how income differentials and immigration policies jointly shape bilateral migration flows — a landmark in the economics of migration and a fitting flagship for the new journal.
• Michaela Benson and Karen O'Reilly (2016), "From lifestyle migration to lifestyle in migration: Categories, concepts and ways of thinking." DOI: 10.1093/migration/mnv015. An agenda-setting conceptual intervention that moved the debate from "lifestyle migration" as a category of migrant toward "lifestyle in migration" as an analytical lens, reshaping how sociologists think about relatively privileged mobilities.
• Jørgen Carling, Marta Bivand Erdal, and Rojan Ezzati (2014), "Beyond the insider–outsider divide in migration research." DOI: 10.1093/migration/mnt022. A widely cited methodological and reflexive contribution on positionality in migration research, challenging the simplistic insider/outsider binary and influencing research ethics and methods across the field.
• Anna C. Korteweg (2017), "The failures of 'immigrant integration': The gendered racialized production of non-belonging." DOI: 10.1093/migration/mnx025. A critical feminist intervention arguing that integration discourse itself produces non-belonging through gendered and racialized mechanisms — representative of the journal's appetite for theoretically ambitious critique.
• Ċetta Mainwaring (2016), "Migrant agency: Negotiating borders and migration controls." DOI: 10.1093/migration/mnw013. A key contribution to the agency-structure debate in border and migration control studies, examining how migrants negotiate, resist, and navigate restrictive regimes.
• K. Long (2013), "When refugees stopped being migrants: Movement, labour and humanitarian protection." DOI: 10.1093/migration/mns001. Published in the journal's inaugural year, this article excavated the historical moment when refugees were discursively and institutionally separated from "migrants" — a separation with lasting consequences for labour mobility and humanitarian protection. It exemplifies the journal's historical sensibility: using the past to unsettle the categories through which the present is governed.

Together these papers exemplify the journal's editorial mission: comparative, theoretical, and methodological advances with broad relevance beyond a single case or discipline.

The Journal's Field-Building Role

Migration Studies was founded on an explicit field-building wager: that migration research, scattered across the journals of a dozen disciplines, would benefit from a dedicated outlet that consolidates concepts, methods, and debates. More than a decade on, the wager has largely paid off. The journal's most-cited papers are precisely the kind of agenda-setting interventions the founders hoped for — Ortega and Peri's economics of migration, Carling, Erdal and Ezzati's reflexive methodology, Benson and O'Reilly's reconceptualisation of lifestyle migration, Korteweg's feminist critique of integration discourse, Mainwaring's theorisation of migrant agency. Each of these travelled beyond its immediate empirical setting to reshape debate across the field.

Several features of the journal's design support this role. The annual special-issue programme, coordinated by the Deputy Editor, functions as a field-wide agenda-setting mechanism, convening interdisciplinary conversations on emerging themes — the recent special issue on "mobile temporalities," for instance, stages a cross-disciplinary dialogue between politics, sociology, geography, and anthropology on how time and mobility intersect. The journal's explicit encouragement of proposals featuring scholars from the Global South, Global East, and non-anglophone contexts is a deliberate corrective to the field's historic concentration in the Global North. The journal also maintains a public-facing presence through the OUPblog, where editors and authors translate research for wider audiences. And the partial triple-anonymized review model — rare among social science journals — signals a commitment to fairness in evaluation that the journal backs with unusual operational transparency, including a published annual report and detailed turnaround statistics.

The journal's metrics trajectory tells the same story of consolidation: from a new title awaiting its first SSCI listing in 2013, to a 2025 Impact Factor of 2.8, a 5-year IF of 3.5, and a CiteScore of 3.9 — figures that place it solidly among the leading dedicated migration journals internationally. With nearly 160,000 full-text uses in 2025, its readership extends well beyond migration specialists to policymakers, practitioners, and scholars in adjacent fields.

Publishing Guidance

Migration Studies is unusually transparent about its editorial expectations, and prospective authors should take the official guidance seriously:

• Theoretical contribution is non-negotiable: OUP states that manuscripts "lacking a clear contribution to wider scholarly conversations" are unlikely to succeed. Single-case studies must demonstrate broader analytical relevance and engage relevant conceptual debates.
• Comparative and methodological advances are prioritised: the journal explicitly gives priority to methodological, comparative, and theoretical advances — the landmark papers above all fit this description.
• Policy-only papers will struggle: manuscripts "primarily focused on policy analysis and evaluation" are flagged by the editors as unlikely to be successful.
• Length: submissions should not exceed 10,000 words, excluding abstract, reference list, and supplementary materials (but including notes and figure/table captions).
• Review model: partial triple-anonymized review — initial editorial assessment is fully anonymous; external review is double-anonymized. Format-free original submission is accepted, lowering the barrier to initial submission.
• Speed and selectivity: with a ~10% acceptance rate and 16 days to first decision (Q1 2024), the journal is selective but editorially efficient; desk decisions are fast.
• Special issues: the journal runs annual calls for special issue proposals (coordinated by Deputy Editor Maria Koinova) and caps special issues at around fifteen papers including the introduction — a useful route for agenda-setting collections, especially those featuring scholars from the Global South, Global East, and non-anglophone contexts, which the journal particularly encourages.
• After acceptance: a copyedited, proofed version is published online as soon as ready, then included in a paginated quarterly issue.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of Migration Studies?
2049-5838 (print), 2049-5846 (online).

Who publishes Migration Studies?
Oxford University Press (United Kingdom). It is an online-only journal.

When was Migration Studies founded?
Launched in March 2013; the founding Editor-in-Chief was Professor Alan Gamlen (2010–2020).

What is the impact factor of Migration Studies?
2.8 (Clarivate Journal Impact Factor, 2025 metrics, per OUP); 5-year IF 3.5; Scopus CiteScore 3.9.

What is the acceptance rate?
Approximately 10% (per OUP).

Is Migration Studies open access?
No — it is a hybrid journal (not in DOAJ). Open access is available via OUP's Oxford Open programme; confirm the current APC with OUP.

How long can my manuscript be?
Maximum 10,000 words excluding abstract, references, and supplementary materials.

What review model does it use?
Partial triple-anonymized review: anonymous initial editorial assessment, then double-anonymized external review.

Where do I submit?
Through the online submission system linked from the journal's official Oxford Academic page, which also carries the author guidelines and special-issue calls.

Does the journal offer fee waivers or discounts for open access?
OUP operates waiver and discount programmes, including for authors in developing countries and through institutional Read & Publish agreements. Eligibility and the current APC should be confirmed with OUP at submission, as this profile does not quote an unverified figure.

How does the special issue programme work?
The journal issues annual calls for special issue proposals, coordinated by Deputy Editor Professor Maria Koinova. A published special issue may contain up to around fifteen papers including the introduction, which must lay out the themes, debates, and the collection's advance on theory, methodology, or evidence.

Is Migration Studies the same as the Polish journal "Studia Migracyjne – Przegląd Polonijny"?
No. That is a separate quarterly, Migration Studies – Review of Polish Diaspora, published by the Committee for Migration Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The OUP journal profiled here is the international, online-only title launched in 2013.

Which databases index the journal?
Scopus and the Web of Science (Social Sciences Citation Index), confirmed by its Scopus CiteScore/SNIP and Clarivate Journal Impact Factor. Its ISSNs are 2049-5838 (print) and 2049-5846 (online).

Where can I read the journal's annual report?
The journal publishes an annual report on its operations, performance, and strategic direction, linked from the About page on Oxford Academic; the 2024 report (covering the 2024 calendar year) was published in August 2025. It is a useful source for submission and turnaround statistics beyond the headline metrics quoted here.

Does the journal use article numbers or page ranges?
As an online-only journal, Migration Studies assigns article identifiers (e.g., mnag009) and later paginates accepted papers into quarterly issues — the copyedited version appears online first, then joins a paginated issue, keeping citable records stable throughout. Volume 14 corresponds to the 2026 publishing year, confirming the unbroken run since the 2013 launch.