Policy Sciences

Policy Sciences is published by Springer Nature and is in Zone 2 of Management in the CAS Journal Ranking (2025 upgraded edition). By OpenAlex counts of its recent articles, its largest topics are Policy Transfer and Learning, Public Policy and Administration Research and Sustainability and Climate Change Governance, together about 33.6% of its articles. Its main subfields are Political Science and International Relations. (generated from OpenAlex topic counts and CAS ranking data)

The policy sciences are distinctive within the policy movement in that they embrace the scholarly traditions innovated and elaborated by Harold D. Lasswell and Myres S. McDougal. Within these pages we provide space for approaches that are problem-oriented, contextual, and multi-method in orientation. There are many other journals in which authors can take top-down, deductive, and large-sample approach or adopt a primarily theoretical focus. Policy Sciences encourages systematic and empirical investigations in which problems are clearly identified from a practical and theoretical perspective, are well situated in the extant literature, and are investigated utilizing methodologies compatible with contextual, as opposed to reductionist, understandings. We tend not to publish pieces that are solely theoretical, but favor works in which the applied policy lessons are clearly articulated. Policy Sciences favors, but does not publish exclusively, works that either explicitly or implicitly utilize the policy sciences framework. The policy sciences can be applied to articles with greater or lesser intensity to accommodate the focus of an author’s work. At the minimum, this means taking a problem oriented, multi-method or contextual approach. At the fullest expression, it may mean leveraging central theory or explicitly applying aspects of the framework, which is comprised of three principal dimensions: (1) social process, which is mapped in terms of participants, perspectives, situations, base values, strategies, outcomes and effects, with values (power, wealth, enlightenment, skill, rectitude, respect, well-being, and affection) being the key elements in understanding participants’ behaviors and interactions; (2) decision process, which is mapped in terms of seven functions—intelligence, promotion, prescription, invocation, application, termination, and appraisal; and (3) problem orientation, which comprises the intellectual tasks of clarifying goals, describing trends, analyzing conditions, projecting developments, and inventing, evaluating, and selecting alternatives. There is a more extensive core literature that also applies and can be visited at the policy sciences website: http://www.policysciences.org/classicworks.cfm. In addition to articles that explicitly utilize the policy sciences framework, Policy Sciences has a long tradition of publishing papers that draw on various aspects of that framework and its central theory as well as high quality conceptual

From the journal's Aims & Scope

Research area (LetPub): Multiple

Editor-in-chief Michael HowlettPublisher website

Editorial board by country: 1 in mainland China (about 2%); most named United States 15, Canada 4, United Kingdom 3, Australia 3, Singapore 3 (41 members with a country) Editorial board ↗Publisher website · 2026-09-29

CAS Journal Ranking

Database indexing

SSCIScopusLetPub

International journal early-warning lists: not listed in any editionLetPub

Indexing the journal's website claims

SCIEEconLitCurrent ContentsPublisher website

Other: Google Scholar, EBSCO, ProQuest, Dimensions, CNKI, Baidu, Naver, OCLC, Portico, CLOCKSS, RePEc

As the journal's website lists them, not checked against each database; for Web of Science editions the records above apply.

Editions, and major and minor categories, are shown separately and never merged into one zone; check which edition your institution uses before you submit or report.

Impact

Impact factor

4.53LetPub · 2026-09-13

Impact factor (publisher) 2025

4.5Publisher website · 2026-09-29

5-year impact factor (publisher) 2025

5.8Publisher website · 2026-09-29

CiteScore 2026-06

6.8LetPub · 2026-09-13

SJR 2026-06

1.27LetPub · 2026-09-13

SNIP 2026-06

1.92LetPub · 2026-09-13

h-index

112OpenAlex · 2026-10-01

i10-index

852OpenAlex · 2026-10-01

2-year mean citedness

4.75OpenAlex · 2026-10-01

Self-citation rate

6.7%LetPub · 2026-09-13

Share of gold OA articles

62%LetPub · 2026-09-13

Volume

Articles per year

34LetPub · 2026-09-13

Downloads per year (publisher) 2025

501,500Publisher website · 2026-09-29

Sources count differently and were observed at different times, so each source's own value is kept; "publisher" marks figures from the journal's website.

Other sources

Submission to first decision

6 daysPublisher website · 2026-09-29

Peer review

Double anonymous peer reviewPublisher website

Community reports come from authors' own submissions (confidence 0.5) and are not a promise from the journal; for publisher figures, the journal's own definitions apply.

A hybrid journal charges the APC only when the author chooses open access; publishing under the subscription model is usually free.

Other charges and waivers (author guidelines)

Page charges

Color in the print version

The journal's website is authoritative for fees; sources were observed at different times and each keeps its own value, without averaging.

Excerpts are quoted from the journal's website; "model summary" lines are written by Workers AI and checked against the text. The journal's website is authoritative.

Publisher

Springer Nature

Frequency

4 issues per year

ISSN

0032-2687

Electronic ISSN

1573-0891

Latest issue on the website

Volume 59, Issue 2 (June 2026)

Official links

• Journal homepage ↗OpenAlex
• Submission system ↗Publisher website
• Author guidelines ↗LetPub
• Special issues ↗Publisher website