The Journal of Early Adolescence

About The Journal of Early Adolescence

The Journal of Early Adolescence: A Full Profile

The Journal of Early Adolescence (JEA) is a peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary scholarly journal devoted to a single, sharply defined developmental window: the years from about 10 through 14 years of age. Published by SAGE Publishing in the United States, it has appeared since 1981 and describes itself, in its publisher's materials, as the only peer-reviewed, multidisciplinary journal dedicated to the early adolescent development period. That narrow age focus, held consistently for more than four decades, is the journal's defining editorial choice. Rather than treating adolescence as one long stage running from puberty to the end of secondary school, JEA isolates the transition out of childhood — the move into middle school or junior secondary education, the onset of puberty, the reordering of friendships, and the first sustained negotiation of autonomy from parents — and treats that transition as a subject worthy of its own literature, its own methods debate, and its own community of readers.

For authors, the practical consequence is important. A manuscript that would be a small contribution to a broad developmental journal can be a central contribution here if it speaks precisely to ages 10 to 14. Conversely, a study whose sample is mainly 16- to 18-year-olds, however strong, is a poor fit. This profile explains what the journal publishes, how its peer review is organised, how often it appears, how it is indexed, what its bibliographic identifiers are, and how prospective authors and readers should judge fit — using only information stated by the publisher and by established indexing and ranking services, and flagging plainly where a detail could not be verified from an official source.

Bibliographic Identity

The journal's print International Standard Serial Number is 0272-4316 and its electronic ISSN is 1552-5449. Both numbers are recorded on the Journals World record for this post and agree with the publisher's and Scopus-derived listings. The title is sometimes shortened to J Early Adolesc in citations and to JEA in professional correspondence. Publication coverage in indexing services runs from 1981 to the present, which matches the publisher's statement that the journal has served the field for over 40 years. The publisher of record is SAGE Publications Inc., based in Thousand Oaks, California, in the United States, operating internationally as SAGE Publishing. That publisher attribution also matches the Journals World record for this post, which lists SAGE Publishing; no conflict between the stored publisher field and the official publisher listing was found during preparation of this profile.

The journal is published in English and is aimed at an international authorship and readership. Its articles carry Digital Object Identifiers in the SAGE pattern, and its content is sold mainly through institutional subscriptions, with individual articles also sold by the publisher and with an optional open-access route discussed below.

History and Editorial Mission

JEA was founded at a moment when developmental science was beginning to argue that early adolescence was not simply late childhood. The early 1980s saw growing research attention to pubertal timing, to the transition to larger and more departmentalised schools, and to the fit between young adolescents' developmental needs and the environments schools actually provided. A dedicated journal gave that emerging conversation a home. The publisher's current description still frames the mission in those terms: the journal publishes work that increases understanding of individuals aged 10 through 14 within the life span, presenting major theoretical papers, state-of-the-art reviews, and current research, alongside reviews of important professional books and of early adolescent films and literature.

Over more than forty years the journal's audience has broadened well beyond its psychological home. SAGE lists its readership across developmental psychology, educational psychology, human development and family studies, psychiatry, public health, social work, and sociology. That breadth is deliberate. Early adolescence is shaped simultaneously by biology, family, peers, school organisation, neighbourhood, and culture, and no single discipline owns all of those levels. JEA's editorial model therefore welcomes a paper on pubertal development, a paper on classroom belonging, and a paper on neighbourhood context in the same volume, provided each is rigorous and each is genuinely about the early adolescent period rather than adolescence in general.

The editor named in the publisher's materials consulted for this profile is Alexander T. Vazsonyi, whose university contact address is given by SAGE for special-issue proposals. Prospective guest editors are explicitly welcomed by the publisher, and single-theme special issues are a long-standing feature of the journal. Readers checking the masthead should confirm the current editor and associate editors on the journal's own SAGE page before submitting, because editorial teams change over time and the masthead, not any secondary directory, is authoritative.

Scope: What the Journal Publishes

The journal's in-depth coverage, as described by SAGE, clarifies and analyses significant advances and issues from diverse developmental contexts — peers, school, family, neighbourhood, and culture. Recurring subject areas include educational motivation and achievement, identity development including self-esteem and self-concept, problem behaviours including health risks and reactions to stress, sexuality, and research design and methodology itself. The publisher's topic list for recent issues is a useful map of the territory: academic competence and transitions; affect and emotions; attachment relationships; bullying and cyberbullying; cross-cultural and cross-national comparisons; deviance and delinquency; eating disorders; educational transitions; ethnic and racial comparisons; externalising problems; identity development; interventions and programme evaluations; internalising problems; moral development; parenting and family processes; peer relations and friendships; positive youth development; problem and risk behaviours; prosocial behaviours; puberty and pubertal development; self-esteem and self-worth; self-image; self-regulation and self-control; and sexual activity.

Three features of that list deserve emphasis. First, contexts matter as much as traits: papers that situate development inside families, peer networks, schools, or cultures are central, not decorative. Second, comparison is valued — cross-cultural, cross-national, and ethnic and racial comparisons recur because early adolescence looks different in different school systems and communities, and the journal wants that variation documented rather than averaged away. Third, intervention work belongs here: programme evaluations and science-based practice sit alongside basic empirical and theoretical work, reflecting the publisher's statement that the journal serves practitioners as well as researchers.

Article Types and Lengths

SAGE describes three regular formats. Regular Papers present original research and theoretical work from around the world, at roughly 30 to 35 pages. Brief Reports communicate original research, basic and applied, or conceptual and theoretical work in about 20 pages. Rapid Communiqués offer rapid and succinct communication of cutting-edge findings in about 8 pages, and — importantly — they still require a conceptual or theoretical framework; a bare descriptive finding without framing is not what the format is for. In addition, the journal publishes single-theme special issues of five to eight papers that cover a subject of current interest in depth, with a stated preference for areas that have historically received limited attention, as well as guest editorials that encourage professional dialogue across the disciplines concerned with early adolescence.

Authors should treat those page expectations as real editorial signals. A regular empirical paper is expected to develop its literature, methods, and discussion fully; a brief report must make its point economically; and a communiqué must be both short and conceptually anchored. Manuscripts that are strong research but written at the wrong length for any of the journal's formats are at risk of being returned for restructuring before review.

Peer Review and Editorial Process

According to the publisher, each article goes through rigorous double-anonymous peer review, completed in 90 days or less, by at least two and up to four members of an international, multidisciplinary panel of experts. Authors submitting through SAGE are asked to prepare an anonymised manuscript, with a separate title page carrying the full author list and affiliations, the corresponding author's contact details, acknowledgements, any declaration of conflicting interest, a funding statement, ethical approval and informed-consent statements where relevant, and a data availability statement. Those title-page requirements are set out in the journal's submission guidelines on the SAGE Journals platform.

Because research with 10- to 14-year-olds almost always involves minors, editors and reviewers pay close attention to ethics reporting: institutional approval, parental or guardian consent, and the assent of the young participants themselves. A methods section that is silent on any of those points will draw questions. The same applies to school-based research, where permission from the school or district, and the handling of pupil data, should be described in terms a reader in another country can follow.

Frequency and Publication Model

SAGE states that the journal appears nine times a year. That frequency — higher than the quarterly pattern common in developmental journals — supports the special-issue programme and keeps the interval between acceptance and appearance comparatively manageable for a subscription journal. The journal is principally a subscription title: libraries subscribe, and readers without a subscription can purchase individual articles from the publisher. SAGE also operates optional open-access publishing for its journals through its SAGE Choice programme, under which an author whose article has been accepted can pay a charge to make the final published version openly accessible. The exact open-access charge for this journal at the time a reader checks is not stated in the publisher materials summarised here and should be confirmed on the journal's own SAGE page before budgeting; it is therefore described in this profile as not publicly disclosed in the sources consulted, rather than guessed. Authors should also check whether their institution holds a read-and-publish agreement with SAGE, since such agreements can cover or discount the charge entirely — the publisher maintains a list of current agreements.

There is no submission fee for a standard subscription-model submission of the kind described in the journal's guidelines. Authors should not pay any third party that claims to guarantee acceptance; the journal's only submission route is its official system linked from the SAGE journal homepage.

Indexing, Metrics, and Standing

JEA is widely indexed. The publisher's listing includes the Abstract Journal of the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC), Child Development Abstracts and Bibliography, Clarivate's Current Contents, the Combined Health Information Database, Criminal Justice Abstracts, EBSCO services including Family Studies Abstracts and Violence and Abuse Abstracts, and the ERIC Current Index to Journals in Education, among others. The journal is also covered by Scopus, and ranking services derived from Scopus data place it in the upper quartiles of several of its subject categories, with quartile placement varying by category and by year — a pattern normal for a journal that sits across psychology, education, and sociology categories at once. Its h-index in Scopus-derived services is in the high eighties in recent listings, reflecting a long tail of heavily cited work on parenting, ethnic identity development, and classroom belonging, among other topics.

Two cautions belong with any metric. First, quartile and impact figures move every year and differ between the Journal Citation Reports and Scopus-based services, so any single number quoted in a directory should be re-checked against the current release before it is used in a promotion or funding document. Second, fit matters more than rank for this journal: because its age band is so specific, its citation community is the community that actually works on 10- to 14-year-olds, and publication there signals membership of that conversation in a way a higher-ranked general journal may not.

Who Should Submit — and Who Should Not

The strongest candidates are studies designed around early adolescence itself: samples centred on ages 10 to 14 or on the first years of secondary schooling; longitudinal work that follows children across the transition into adolescence; studies of pubertal timing and its social consequences; family and peer research where the developmental moment is doing explanatory work; school-transition and motivation research; and evaluations of interventions delivered to this age group. Cross-national work is welcome, provided the paper explains the school structures and cultural context well enough for international readers.

Weak candidates include studies whose samples span mid-to-late adolescence with no separate analysis of the younger band; clinical studies of disorders with no developmental framing; and papers on university students or adults that mention adolescence only in passing. Editors can, and do, return off-scope manuscripts quickly, so an honest fit check before submission saves everyone time. If only part of a dataset falls in the age band, authors should say so plainly and justify the analysis they present.

Guidance for Authors

Prepare the manuscript to the journal's guidelines on the SAGE platform, anonymise it thoroughly — including file properties and self-citations phrased in the first person — and put all identifying and administrative information on the separate title page. State the exact age range and school grades of participants early in the abstract and methods; for this journal, age is not a demographic detail but the core scope criterion, and reviewers look for it. Report ethics approval, consent, and assent explicitly. Choose the article type deliberately and write to its length. For special issues, contact the editor first with a proposal rather than submitting a completed collection uninvited. Finally, write the discussion for a multidisciplinary readership: define discipline-specific terms, explain measures that readers outside your subfield may not know, and draw out the implication for at least one audience beyond your own — teachers, family researchers, or practitioners — where the findings honestly support it.

Guidance for Readers and Librarians

For researchers, the journal's backfile from 1981 onward is a longitudinal record of how the field's questions have changed: from early work on family socialisation and substance use, through ethnic identity development, to contemporary work on cyberbullying, digital life, and positive youth development. For librarians, the title is a core holding for education, psychology, and human-development collections, is heavily used in teacher-education and school-counselling programmes, and is available through SAGE journal packages as well as by title subscription. Readers without institutional access should check whether individual articles are openly accessible under the publisher's optional open-access programme or deposited by authors in institutional repositories in accepted-manuscript form, in line with the publisher's archiving policy.

Frequently Asked Questions

What ages does the journal cover? Individuals from 10 through 14 years of age, as stated by the publisher.

What are its ISSNs? Print 0272-4316; electronic 1552-5449.

Who publishes it? SAGE Publications Inc. (SAGE Publishing), United States.

How often does it appear? Nine times a year, according to the publisher.

Is peer review anonymous? Yes — the publisher describes rigorous double-anonymous review by two to four experts, completed in 90 days or less.

Is it open access? It is principally a subscription journal with an optional paid open-access route for accepted articles; the current charge should be confirmed on the journal's SAGE page, as it was not publicly disclosed in the materials consulted for this profile.

Does it publish special issues? Yes — single-theme issues of five to eight papers, and proposals from guest editors are welcomed by the editor.

Verification Note

This profile is based on the publisher's journal description and submission guidelines, on Scopus-derived ranking and indexing listings, and on the bibliographic record held by Journals World. Where an official figure changes annually — metrics, quartiles, editorial personnel, and open-access charges — the profile describes the structure rather than freezing a number that will date, and readers are directed to the journal's own SAGE page for the current value.

A Note on Development Within the Journal's Pages

Reading across the journal's decades shows the field itself maturing. Early volumes are dominated by family socialisation, school adjustment, and the first systematic work on how parenting styles relate to competence and substance use — work that became foundational far beyond the journal. Later volumes add the study of ethnic and racial identity as a developmental process in its own right, of peer crowds and friendships as contexts rather than backdrops, and of the transition to middle school as an ecological event in which the fit between pupil and environment matters as much as the pupil alone. Most recent volumes reflect the field's current concerns: digital media and cyberbullying, sleep and health, positive youth development, and cross-national comparison using large international datasets. An author submitting today is therefore writing into a conversation with a memory, and the strongest submissions acknowledge that memory — citing the journal's own earlier contributions where they are genuinely relevant — rather than treating the literature as if it began with the newest dataset.

For completeness, this record — The Journal of Early Adolescence, post 355384 — and the site's shorter-titled record Journal of Early Adolescence refer to one and the same SAGE journal, identified by the shared ISSN pair 0272-4316 and 1552-5449. Both forms of the title circulate in citations, and literature searches should be run under both, with the ISSN pair used to confirm that a retrieved item belongs to this journal and not to the similarly named Journal of Adolescence or Journal of Youth and Adolescence, which are different publications.