The Journal of Psychology

About The Journal of Psychology

The Journal of Psychology — Profile and Guide

The Journal of Psychology, in its full modern form The Journal of Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Applied, is a long-established, peer-reviewed psychology journal published by Taylor & Francis (through its Routledge journals operation), founded in 1935 by the American psychologist, organiser, publisher and editor Carl Murchison. Its print ISSN is 0022-3980 and its electronic ISSN is 1940-1019 — the pair recorded for the title on its Taylor & Francis Online journal pages (journal code vjrl20), in its reference records (OCLC 1782317) and in OpenAlex, which lists the same two ISSNs, the same publisher and the same journal home page for the same title. It publishes empirical research and theoretical articles in applied areas of psychology, and it is deliberately interdisciplinary: it solicits work that integrates psychology with other fields, encourages multidisciplinary authorship, and looks for research that fosters novel ideas, identifies mediating variables, addresses questions that cross boundaries, and encourages critical analysis. OpenAlex records about 6,408 works for the title, an h-index of 146 in its snapshot and a two-year mean citedness of about 2.5 — the citation footprint of a journal that has been publishing continuously, under the same title, for ninety years.

A note on the record itself belongs at the front of this profile. This site carries a second record, Journal of Psychology (post 11910, slug journal-of-psychology), whose stored ISSNs are exactly the same pair — 1940-1019 and 0022-3980 — and which therefore records the same journal under a shortened form of its title. That pair was verified by direct fetches of post 11910 at two different moments during the preparation of this profile; on both fetches it was a thin, template-only record (258 visible words, no depth marker). The present record (post 333780) is the full-title record, and this profile is published here; the pair is reported with the profile as a confirmed duplicate candidate on exact ISSN evidence, for handling under the site's standing duplicate procedure. Nothing in the journal itself is duplicated: there is one journal, founded in 1935, with one ISSN pair, and it is described once, in full, below.

Quick Facts

History: Carl Murchison, Heldref and Taylor & Francis

The journal was founded in 1935 by Carl Murchison. Murchison was one of the great organisers of early American psychology publishing: an American psychologist who, as organiser, publisher and editor, co-founded a family of psychology journals that included The Journal of Genetic Psychology, The Journal of Social Psychology and The Journal of General Psychology, alongside this title. That family resemblance still shows in the journal's character. Murchison's journals were built to give defined areas of a rapidly professionalising discipline a regular, respectable and cumulative outlet, and The Journal of Psychology was the broadest of them — the general-applied title in a stable that also held the developmental, social and general-theoretical titles.

The journal's own archive, as listed on Taylor & Francis Online, tells the story of its scale in volumes. Volume 1 appeared in 1935 and volume 2 in 1936; through the middle decades the journal appeared at a rate of several volumes a year — the archive lists, for example, volumes 115, 116 and 117 all within 1983–1984 — reflecting the era when it was issued in frequent, smaller parts. In its modern form the archive settles to one numbered volume a year with multiple issues: volume 158 is the 2024 volume, with issue 8 as its eighth number, consistent with the eight-issues-a-year pattern recorded in recent Scopus-derived listings, while the journal's reference summary describes it as bimonthly. Authors citing older work should therefore expect irregular volume-to-year mapping in the early and middle archive and a clean one-volume-per-year mapping in the recent archive, and should always cite the volume, issue and year as printed rather than inferring one from another.

For most of the twentieth century the journal was a Heldref Publications title — Heldref being the Washington-based educational publisher that carried Murchison's journal family — and its modern history turns on a single transaction: in 2009, Heldref sold ownership of the titles to Taylor & Francis. With that transfer, the journal's reference summary records, The Journal of Psychology became headquartered in Philadelphia. Under Taylor & Francis it sits in the Routledge journals portfolio, is published and sold through Taylor & Francis Online with the journal code vjrl20, and is offered with that platform's standard apparatus of latest articles, special issues, open-access articles, most-read and most-cited lists, alerts and citation export. A bibliometric history of the journal covering 1936 to 2015, published in the journal itself (Tur-Porcar and colleagues, 2018, volume 152, pages 199–225), provides a scholarly account of its first eighty years for readers who want the journal's development documented from its own pages rather than summarised from outside.

Scope: Applied, Interdisciplinary and Proud of Both

The journal's aims and scope, as published by Taylor & Francis and reproduced in its journal listings, define it with unusual care, and the exclusions matter as much as the inclusions. It publishes empirical research, theoretical articles and selected reviews in applied areas of psychology — other than applied experimental psychology and human factors, which sit outside its stated remit. The applied areas it names are extensive: behavioural psychology, clinical psychology, cognitive psychology, counselling psychology, cultural psychology, economic psychology, educational psychology, environmental psychology, ethics in psychology, family psychology and couples psychology, forensic psychology, health psychology, industrial and personnel psychology, managerial and leadership psychology, measurement and assessment, professional practice, psychology of religion, psychotherapy, school psychology, social psychology, sport psychology, and work, industrial and organisational psychology.

Read that list as a map of psychology as it is practised and applied, rather than as a set of laboratory sub-disciplines, and the editorial intent becomes clear. This is a journal for research whose question arises in a setting — a clinic, a school, a workplace, a courtroom, a congregation, a team, a family — and whose answer is meant to be usable there. Within that applied frame, the journal adds its defining second condition: it solicits interdisciplinary research that integrates the literatures of psychology with other related fields — occupational health, consumer behaviour, law, religion, communication and political science are the examples its scope text gives — in a meaningful and productive manner. It encourages multidisciplinary authorship, and it says what it wants such work to do: foster novel ideas, identify mediating variables, include questions that cross traditional boundaries, and, most importantly in its own wording, encourage critical analysis. A second formulation of the same scope, carried in the journal's listings, sharpens the point: the journal concentrates on work that attempts to integrate divergent data, fields and theories of psychology and related disciplines, or that analyses the interrelationships of novel populations, with a particular forum offered for education, industry, management, and measurement and assessment; its illustrative recent contents under that description ranged from feedback effects on intelligence-test performance and depression's effects on interpersonal perception among students, to employer use of personality tests in recruitment and the relation of impulsivity to suicide ideation in a prison population.

OpenAlex topic data for the title, offered here as a secondary algorithmic picture of the archive rather than an editorial statement, is consistent with that self-description: the largest clusters are psychological testing and assessment, personality traits and psychology, social and intergroup psychology, psychometric methodologies and testing, visual perception and processing, and cognitive abilities and testing. Measurement and assessment — a named special interest in the scope text — shows up in the data as the journal's single largest strand, which will surprise nobody who has browsed its recent issues: the 2024 volume's eighth issue, for example, moves from meaning-in-life profiles among Chinese rural adolescents and self-construal, social pain and gender in young adults, through entrepreneurial personality and its outcomes beyond established personality models, to field of study, personality, maths anxiety and numeracy, and stressful life events and online deviant behaviour among college students. That is the scope in action — applied questions, varied populations, personality and measurement at the centre, and no single national or laboratory tradition dominating the contents. Periodically the journal announces calls for papers for special issues, and it will also entertain unsolicited proposals for special issues that fit its stated scope; the scope text directs proposers to contact the journal's executive editors with a detailed description of the proposal — a sign that special issues here are commissioned against the interdisciplinary-applied test, not assembled merely by topic label.

Peer Review, Indexing and Metrics — With Sources and Dates

The journal's reference summary describes it as a double-blind (double-anonymous) peer-reviewed journal under Taylor & Francis: neither authors nor reviewers are identified to each other. For empirical psychology, where author, institution and laboratory can carry strong reputational signals, double-anonymous review is a substantive choice, and authors should prepare manuscripts accordingly — removing self-identifying text, citations phrased in the first person to their own prior work where the publisher's instructions require it, and identifying material in supplementary files — following the current instructions for authors for journal code vjrl20 on Taylor & Francis Online. Those instructions, together with the platform's editorial policies and submission site, are the operative documents at submission time; this profile deliberately does not reproduce word limits or file requirements that the publisher may have updated since it was researched.

On indexing, the journal's reference summary records that it is abstracted and indexed in PsycINFO, Scopus and FRANCIS. Scopus-derived listings (reported here as secondary sources, with their figures attributed as such) give its coverage history as 1936–1959 and 1962 to the present — a near-continuous run that matches the journal's unbroken publication under its own title — an h-index of 83 to 88 in different listing snapshots (this site's own thin duplicate record stored 88; the SCImago-derived listing reported 83, a difference that reflects snapshot dates rather than disagreement about the journal), and a SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) of 0.929 in the reported listing, with best-quartile placements of Q1 in Business, Management and Accounting (miscellaneous) and Q1 in Education in that same Scopus-based classification, and Q2 in Psychology (miscellaneous). That quartile pattern is worth pausing on, because it surprises authors who think of the title as purely a psychology journal: the interdisciplinary-applied scope genuinely registers in the classification systems, and work at psychology's boundary with education and with management is not peripheral to this journal's standing — in Scopus terms it is where the journal ranks highest. OpenAlex, independently, gives a higher cumulative h-index of 146 and a two-year mean citedness of about 2.54 in its snapshot; cumulative h-indices from different databases over different windows are not comparable to each other, and the profile reports each under its own source rather than merging them into a single invented figure. A Journal Impact Factor figure is published for the title by Clarivate and is displayed on the publisher's journal pages; secondary listings reported a figure of 2.9 in one recent snapshot, but because the current year's figure was not verified from the publisher page in the research for this profile, authors who need it — for a promotion case, a funder report or a library decision — should take the current figure from Taylor & Francis Online or Journal Citation Reports directly, with its year attached, rather than from this or any other secondary profile.

Some of the journal's most-cited individual articles illustrate the long tail that a ninety-year archive creates. Secondary bibliometric listings for the title single out, among its most-cited papers, a protection-motivation-theory paper on fear appeals and attitude change, a standardised memory scale for clinical use, and a classic paper on attitudes and cognitive organisation — work from different eras and different corners of applied psychology, still accumulating citations decades after publication. That is the realistic citation expectation for this journal: not rapid, news-driven citation, but durable uptake of useful measures, frameworks and findings by later applied research.

Who Should Publish Here — and How to Judge Fit Honestly

The right author for this journal has an applied or interdisciplinary psychology paper that is too integrated, too population-specific or too practice-facing for a narrow sub-disciplinary title, and too empirical or theoretical to be a practitioner magazine piece. Strong fits include: validation and application of measures and assessments in new populations or settings; personality and individual-differences research with applied outcomes — education, work, health, offending, consumer behaviour; clinical, counselling and health-psychology studies framed for application beyond a single clinic; educational and school-psychology research that speaks to other settings as well; organisational and leadership research that integrates psychological theory with management questions; and genuinely interdisciplinary work — psychology and law, psychology and religion, psychology and consumer behaviour — in which the second field is a real partner, present in the literature reviewed, the design and the authorship, not a decorative keyword. The scope's exclusion should be respected just as plainly: applied experimental psychology and human-factors work, as the journal defines them, belong in the titles built for them, and a manuscript whose centre of gravity is a laboratory paradigm with an applied paragraph added at the end will not pass the journal's own stated test.

Practical preparation follows from the scope. Frame the contribution in the introduction as the journal asks its authors to frame it: what divergent data, fields or theories does the paper integrate, what mediating variables does it identify, what boundary does it cross, and what critical analysis does it offer? Name the population and setting precisely and argue for their interest beyond themselves — the scope's interest in novel populations is an invitation to study understudied groups, provided the paper explains what general question the group illuminates. Report measurement fully: in a journal whose largest strand is testing and assessment, reviewers will expect reliability and validity evidence for every measure, in the sample studied, not only in the measure's original validation sample. Declare ethics approvals, consent, competing interests and funding in line with Taylor & Francis editorial policies, and decide the access route — subscription or open access under the publisher's current terms — with the applicable charge taken from the publisher's current pages, since no single current figure could be verified from the sources used here and none is asserted. Finally, check the journal's special-issue calls before submitting a standard article: a paper that fits a live call gains editors actively looking for its topic, and a paper that fits the scope's interdisciplinary test but arrives during a relevant call without acknowledging it has missed a signal the journal was sending on purpose.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of The Journal of Psychology?
Print ISSN 0022-3980 and electronic ISSN 1940-1019.

Who founded it and when?
Carl Murchison, the American psychologist and journal organiser, founded it in 1935. Volume 1 appeared in 1935; volume 158 is the 2024 volume.

Who publishes it now?
Taylor & Francis, through its Routledge journals operation. Heldref Publications formerly published it; Heldref sold the titles to Taylor & Francis in 2009, after which the journal was headquartered in Philadelphia.

What is its full title and scope in one sentence?
As The Journal of Psychology: Interdisciplinary and Applied, it publishes empirical research, theoretical articles and selected reviews in applied areas of psychology (other than applied experimental psychology and human factors), and solicits interdisciplinary work integrating psychology with fields such as law, consumer behaviour, religion, occupational health, communication and political science.

Is peer review anonymous?
Yes — the journal is described in its reference summary as double-blind (double-anonymous) peer-reviewed. Prepare the manuscript to remove identifying material as the publisher's current instructions direct.

Where is it indexed?
Its reference summary records abstracting and indexing in PsycINFO, Scopus and FRANCIS. Scopus-derived listings report coverage from 1936–1959 and 1962 to the present, with Q1 best quartiles in Education and in Business, Management and Accounting (miscellaneous) categories in the reported snapshot.

How often does it appear?
Recent listings record eight issues per year within a single annual volume; its reference summary describes it as bimonthly, reflecting its earlier periodicity. The Taylor & Francis archive confirms one volume per year in the modern period.

Is there another record for this journal on this site?
Yes — post 11910, titled Journal of Psychology, stores exactly the same ISSN pair (0022-3980, 1940-1019) and is the same journal under a shortened title. It was verified thin by two direct fetches during this batch, and the pair is reported as a confirmed duplicate candidate on that ISSN evidence.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile is based on the publisher's Taylor & Francis Online archive for the journal (code vjrl20) for the volume history and current issue pattern; on the journal's published aims-and-scope text as carried in its Taylor & Francis listings for the applied areas, the exclusion of applied experimental and human-factors work, the interdisciplinary conditions and the special-issue proposal route; on the journal's reference summary for the 1935 founding by Carl Murchison, the co-founded sister journals, the 2009 Heldref-to-Taylor & Francis transfer, the Philadelphia headquarters note, double-blind review and the PsycINFO / Scopus / FRANCIS indexing statement; on the bibliometric history published in the journal itself (Tur-Porcar et al., 2018) as cited in that summary; and on OpenAlex (source S49549746) as a secondary source for the ISSN confirmation, archive size and cumulative citation picture. SCImago-derived figures (SJR, h-index range and quartiles) are attributed in the text as secondary, snapshot-dependent listings. The duplicate finding rests on two direct REST fetches of post 11910 at different moments, each showing the identical ISSN pair and thin template content, compared against this post's own record (333780).