Build your editorial board
Learn how to build, recruit, and support a strong board of editors that will shape your journal.
Develop your journal’s scope
A clear, well-defined scope is one of the most powerful tools available to you as an editor. It shapes the direction of your journal, signals its identity to the field, and ensures consistency in editorial decision-making.
What is a journal scope for?
The mission and scope of your journal or section is a short piece of text clearly outlining:
what the journal aims to achieve or bring to the field
specifically which topics are covered, and which are not
what is expected and required from submitted manuscripts.
It helps authors decide whether to submit, supports reviewers in judging fit, and reduces time spent handling manuscripts that are not quite right for the journal.
How to create or refine your scope
Start by writing the scope in just one sentence, in plain language. If you can’t explain your journal’s purpose in one or two lines, it will be hard for authors to interpret your aims, and hard for your editorial team to apply them consistently. A useful test is: could a colleague outside your specialty read the sentence and understand what the journal is for?
A practical way to build the scope is to define three layers:
Core topics: areas you actively seek and want to be known for.
Adjacent topics: related work that fits when it clearly connects back to the core.
Out of scope: work that may be of high quality but belongs elsewhere.
If you’re writing a scope for a specialty section within a journal, you also need to make sure you’re consistent and aligned with the wider journal’s statement.
Using mission, community, and evidence to refine scope
When expanding or refining scope, look at three inputs together: your mission, your community, and your evidence. Your mission is the journal’s long-term contribution (advancing a field, improving practice, connecting disciplines). It’s just as important to describe what you want your journal to become in the future, and what you want to publish more of – not only what you publish today. Your community is who you serve - authors, readers, reviewers, and societies. What does your community need from this journal?
Your evidence is what submissions, citation patterns, and readership data tell you about where the journal is already strong and where it is drifting.
Making scope usable in day-to-day editorial work
Your journal or section's scope should be operational, not aspirational. Be specific about article types and boundaries. For example, if you welcome methods papers, policy analyses, or negative results, say so. If you don’t publish case reports, purely local surveys, or incremental validation studies unless they offer broader insight, say that too.
Your scope needs to be operational so that editors can put it into practice when assessing manuscript fit. Clear limits are useful for submitting authors.
Think of your scope as a living document
Finally, revisit your scope regularly. Work with your journal’s publishing team to undertake a light annual review. Look at what you published, what you declined, what your community is talking about.
Consider any new and emerging themes that have been brought into your journal via Research Topics and now need to be covered in the scope. This will keep the journal coherent while still allowing it to evolve. A stable scope builds trust; a thoughtful scope review builds momentum.
