Types of Journals: Different Academic, Trade and Personal Kinds, with Examples

The Lancet appeared in 1823, Nature in 1869 and The New England Journal of Medicine in 1812, and a teenager’s sticker-covered notebook can be called a journal too. Ask for the types of journals and the answer depends on which of these rooms you walked into. A librarian will list academic titles by subject. A publisher will count by business model. A writer will think of notebooks. This guide takes the groups in turn, starting with the largest and ending with the most private.

Types of journals: four families, one word

The word is older than any of them. It comes from Late Latin diurnalis, daily, by way of Old French jornel. In the later Middle Ages a journal was a book of church services, then a book of daily accounts; around 1600 it became a personal diary, and from 1728 a daily publication. Something kept day by day before it was ever printed.

Four families have grown from that root. Academic journals publish research checked by other experts. Trade and professional journals inform people in one line of work. Literary journals publish creative writing. Personal journals are written for the writer alone. The first family is the biggest by far: one estimate put the number of active academic journals at more than 28,100 in 2012. Growth has been steady for two centuries. By the end of the eighteenth century about 500 scientific periodicals existed, 304 of them in Germany, 53 in France and 34 in England; the total reached an estimated 10,000 by 1950 and 71,000 by 1987, a rise of about 3.46 per cent a year between 1800 and 2003.

The boundaries leak. The Lancet and Nature carry news, comment and letters like a general magazine, and early periodicals mixed everything. The Journal des sçavans of 1665 had obituaries and church history next to science, which is one reason the history of the periodical is told on the page about the oldest magazine.

Academic journals: the research article and its relatives

When people say academic journal they usually mean a peer-reviewed periodical in which researchers publish their own results. Within that, there are different types of journals and different types of article, and the two get confused.

The research article is the standard unit: original findings, commonly 5 to 20 pages, though mathematics and theoretical computer science can run past 80. Review articles gather the results of many papers into one account of the state of a field. Letters, sometimes called communications, are short reports of urgent findings and are fast-tracked. Research notes are shorter reports of less pressing results. Data papers describe datasets and nothing else. Target articles state a position and invite replies from other authors. Some journals also print video papers, pairing a recorded demonstration with a text description.

A few journals have built their identity on one format. Annual Review of Biochemistry, the first title of Annual Reviews, began in 1932 under the Stanford chemist J. Murray Luck to condense a mountain of biochemistry into review articles; the nonprofit publisher now issues 51 journals. Scientific Data, launched by Nature Research in 2014, prints only data descriptions. PLOS ONE does not specialise by format or subject: it opened in December 2006 as an open access mega-journal, accepting work from any science and judging it on whether the methods are sound, not on how important the result looks. It published more than 31,500 papers in 2013 and roughly 16,300 in 2019, a reminder that a model can peak.

The same logic applies to the review of the work itself. Single-blind review hides the reviewers from the authors; double-blind hides both from each other. A newer arrangement, the registered report, reviews the proposal before the data exist. Nature Human Behaviour is one of the journals that use it, which shifts the weight from results to the question and the method.

The route of an article is similar nearly everywhere. The editor, or the editor-in-chief with an editorial board, looks first and may reject at once. If it goes on, outside reviewers read it, typically at least two, and their reports lead to acceptance, revision or rejection. The path is slow, and critics point to bias, delay and the occasional fraudulent paper that gets through, all of which are fair complaints. It remains the main filter that separates one type of academic journal from a preprint server or a blog.

Examples of academic journals by subject and age

Examples help here, because the same word covers titles that differ in size by orders of magnitude. The table lists a handful that are easy to verify.

Some of these have changed names. The BMJ began on 3 October 1840 as the Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal and took its present name in 1857. The Lancet was started by the surgeon Thomas Wakley, who named it after the surgical instrument and aimed it at what he saw as corruption in London medicine. Nature was founded on 4 November 1869 by Norman Lockyer and Alexander Macmillan, and in its pages appeared the structure of DNA in 1953. The New England Journal of Medicine printed the 1846 report on ether anaesthesia by Henry Jacob Bigelow.

On the oldest title there is a small disagreement. Philosophical Transactions is usually called the longest-running scientific journal in continuous publication, while the French Journal des sçavans appeared two months earlier, on 5 January 1665, and is generally accepted as the earliest academic journal in Europe. The French one was broader, covering law and church history as well, which is why the English title often gets the word scientific attached. If you are deciding for yourself: the Paris pamphlet is first, and the London one is first for science alone.

The deeper treatment of how research titles work, from review to indexing, sits on the page about science journals.

Kinds of journals by reader and purpose

A second way to sort kinds of journals ignores format and asks who the journal is for. Some serve a learned society and exist to record what its members find: Philosophical Transactions is the model, and the Royal Society has run it since 1752. Some serve a profession, so that a surgeon, an engineer or a teacher can keep up with practice as well as theory; the medical weeklies belong here, and the BMJ has long carried clinical research beside news and opinion. Some serve a single discipline’s specialists, with titles so narrow that a few hundred people worldwide read them. Some are general, trying to cover all of science in one weekly issue, as Nature has done since 1869.

These kinds of journals carry different expectations. A general weekly wants a result that interests readers outside the field, so it asks for short papers with a broad reach. A specialist title wants the full methods, long and detailed. A professional journal wants the finding in a form a practitioner can use on Monday. Authors who send the same paper to all three tend to be surprised by the replies.

A practical marker of seriousness is the ISSN, the international code that identifies serials, journals and magazines in print or electronic form. The ISSN International Centre in Paris coordinates the network and says that 2.5 million have been assigned. An ISSN proves a serial exists, not that it is any good; The Poetry Review carries 0032-2156. Check the ISSN portal if you want to confirm that a title is registered.

Different models: who pays, and who reads for free

Beyond content, academic journals differ in how they are funded. Under the traditional subscription model, libraries and individuals pay to read. Under open access the article is free to read, and the costs move elsewhere.

Gold open access means the publisher makes every article free on its own site, often against an article processing charge paid by the author, a funder or an institution. PLOS ONE charged $1,745 per article in April 2021, with waivers for authors unable to pay. Green open access means the author deposits a copy in a repository. Hybrid journals keep subscriptions and sell open access to individual articles, which draws the criticism of double-dipping, as readers and authors both pay. Diamond or platinum journals charge neither, relying on societies, universities and grants. The Wikipedia summary of open access sets out each route.

Who owns the title matters as well. Some are held by learned societies, as the Royal Society has held Philosophical Transactions since 1752. Some are held by professional bodies, so the BMA owns the BMJ’s publisher while the editor keeps editorial freedom. Some belong to large commercial houses. A society journal tends to reinvest in the field; a commercial one may offer wider distribution. Neither is automatically better, but a first-time author with a choice should look at who sits on the editorial board before looking at the logo.

Trade and professional journals

A trade journal is written for the people who work in one industry. It runs industry news, appointments, notices from suppliers and job advertisements, and it informs buying and investment decisions. In that sense it works like an academic journal, only the readers are managers and tradespeople, not researchers.

The business model is different. Many printed trade titles use controlled circulation: the copy is free, but only to readers who qualify, because advertisers pay to reach a defined audience. Digital versions more often use paywalls. The Popular Aviation of 1928 was described as the largest-selling American air publication, so trade titles can be large. They are rarely peer-reviewed, though professional journals in law, nursing and teaching sometimes blend the two.

From a reader’s point of view the test is usefulness to the job. A buyer in the grocery trade has no use for a research paper; a pharmacist might use both.

Literary journals and little magazines

Poetry and fiction have their own world of journals. In the United States, the term little magazine goes back to a definition by Frederick J. Hoffman in 1942: a magazine of artistic work not acceptable to the commercial periodicals. The usual traits are non-profit operation, a small page size, two or four issues a year and experiment placed ahead of ease. Early examples are The Dial of 1840 to 1844, edited by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, and The Savoy, edited by Arthur Symons in London in 1896.

In Britain, The Poetry Review has been the house magazine of The Poetry Society since 1912, replacing the Poetical Gazette, and over the decades it has printed Thomas Hardy, W. H. Auden, Ezra Pound and Philip Larkin. Muriel Spark edited it from 1947 to 1949. Under Galloway Kyle in the war years its readership grew from around a thousand to over six thousand per issue. It appears quarterly.

Literary journals usually make the best case for the word. A print run of a few hundred, a volunteer editor and a stack of unsolicited poems: that is a journal in the oldest sense, a record kept issue by issue. Readers who want to find live titles and their submission windows can use the directory of poetry magazines, the Literary Desk and the same site’s poetry competition calendar. Art titles are covered under magazines about art, and political ones under magazines about politics.

Anyone thinking of starting a small journal of their own should read the guide to publishing your own magazine first.

Telling a sound journal from a weak one

The weakest end of academic publishing is the predatory journal. It charges authors but offers little or no peer review, and it often picks a name close to a respected one. Jeffrey Beall documented more than 300 such publishers by April 2013, and he thought there were thousands. In 2019 a US judge fined the OMICS Publishing Group $50 million following a Federal Trade Commission case. The overview of predatory publishing gives the background.

Spotting one takes a few minutes. Does the journal name its editors and their institutions? Can the peer-review process be read on the site? Is it indexed where it says it is? Did it find you by email, praising a paper you did not publish there? The Think. Check. Submit. checklist, backed by organisations including ALPSP, COPE, DOAJ and OASPA, turns these into questions you answer yes or no, and it advises submitting only if every answer is yes. For most early-career authors the advice is simple: pick an established society journal or a recognised open access title, and treat an unsolicited invitation as a reason to check, not a compliment.

What going online changed

Printing used to define the differences between the types of journals: a weekly arrived on a doormat, a quarterly on a library shelf, a trade title in an office tray. Online delivery flattened that. The New England Journal of Medicine launched its website in 1996, and Philosophical Transactions began digital publishing in 1997. Since 2017 the Royal Society has offered a fully digitised run back to 1665, with the issues before 1941 free to read. A reader in Leeds can now open a 1665 volume and a 2026 preprint in the same afternoon.

What did not change is the ranking of trust. Publication date and format say little. The questions that matter are the same as in the print era: who edits it, who reviews it, who pays and who owns it.

Which of the different types of journals to read

For a reader with a question, not a paper to submit, the choice is simpler than the vocabulary suggests. To follow a field, read a review journal first, because one review article saves a month of searching. To judge the latest result, read the research journal, and check whether the finding has been replicated. For news of an industry, read the trade title and discount its advertising. For pleasure, a literary quarterly beats all of them. The different types of journals reward different habits, and nobody reads them all the same way: a review is read once and kept, a trade weekly is skimmed on the train, and a poetry quarterly is read slowly, with a pencil.

Students are usually told to use only peer-reviewed academic titles for essays. That is sensible advice but not an absolute rule: a good trade journal or a clinical weekly’s news section can be the best source on a very recent development, as long as the essay says what kind of source it is.

Personal journals: diaries, logs and bullet lists

The last family is the oldest. Samuel Pepys kept a diary from 1 January 1660 to 31 May 1669, in the shorthand devised by Thomas Shelton, running to about 1.25 million words. It records the Great Plague and the Great Fire of London. It was first published in 1825 by Lord Braybrooke in two volumes, and the manuscripts went with his library to Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Modern personal journals specialise. A dream log records dreams on waking; a gratitude journal lists good things; a travel journal collects tickets and sketches. The bullet journal, which Ryder Carroll began sharing in 2013, combines daily logs, monthly and future logs, an index and a key of symbols in a single notebook, usually a dotted one. By December 2018 it had generated more than three million Instagram posts.

None of these has an editor, a reviewer or a circulation figure, and that is the point. The diary reached the public only in 1825, more than a century after Pepys died in 1703.