Employee Relations: Scopus Indexing, Metrics, Scope & Submission Guide

Journal Information at a Glance

How This Journal Profile Was Prepared

This guide prioritizes the journal’s official Emerald page, including its author guidelines, editorial team, metrics, indexing list and peer-review information. It also uses the supplied Scopus source identifier to distinguish the correct title. Open-access information is checked against Emerald’s current open-access policy and APC page.

Metrics, fees, editorial teams, special issues and database status can change. Treat values in this page as date-qualified information, not permanent attributes; reconfirm any requirement that affects eligibility, funding or institutional recognition immediately before submission.

What Does Employee Relations Aim to Publish?

Emerald describes the journal around the idea that understanding the employment relationship must bring organisational, managerial and employee needs together. Its scope covers international issues across HR, employment and industrial relations, and the journal positions itself as a venue for work that is relevant and valid for scholars and practitioners concerned with managing people.

In practical terms, this creates a broad but coherent field. Research may address employee voice and participation, labour-management relations, HR practices, well-being, reward and pay, work-life balance, employability, worker vulnerability, union strategy, employment regulation, organisational justice, retention, decent work, workplace change and the changing institutions of employment. Recent Emerald issue listings illustrate that breadth: published work has examined decent work conditions, employee ownership, disability and school-to-work transition, moonlighting, employer branding and retention, vulnerable workers’ employability, union resources during factory closure, and pay transparency and organisational justice.

What “broad scope” does not mean

A generic management paper is not automatically an Employee Relations paper. A stronger submission makes the employment relationship central to the research problem. A study of technology, for example, becomes more aligned when it explains consequences for workers, employment practices, HR systems, voice, power, labour processes or employee outcomes rather than treating people as a peripheral implementation issue.

Likewise, a purely technical product evaluation, a general marketing paper, or an organisational topic with no meaningful employment-relations contribution may be better suited elsewhere. Before submission, compare your problem statement and contribution with several recent articles from the journal rather than relying only on a keyword overlap.

Understanding Its Scopus Coverage and Journal Metrics

Emerald’s current indexing list includes Scopus and the Social Sciences Citation Index, alongside Journal Citation Reports, PsycINFO, International Bibliography of Social Sciences and a range of specialist business, HR and education databases. The supplied journal record identifies Scopus Source ID 144738.

The publisher’s current metrics panel lists a 2025 CiteScore of 7.4. It also displayed a 2026 CiteScore Tracker of 6.1 when this page was prepared; because the tracker is updated monthly, it should not be presented as the final 2026 score. Clarivate metrics shown by Emerald are a 2025 Journal Impact Factor of 3.2 and a 2025 five-year Impact Factor of 3.8.

Rankings can also be context-specific. Emerald lists CABS (UK) 2, ABDC B and VHB Publication Media Rating 2024 Level B among the journal’s ranking references. These should not be confused with Scopus quartiles or the Journal Impact Factor.

Is This Journal a Good Match for Your Research?

Employee Relations is likely to be most relevant when the manuscript asks a substantial question about people at work and connects that question to employment or HR institutions, practices, relationships or outcomes. The journal’s international orientation can be attractive for cross-country studies, nationally grounded research with broader theoretical implications, comparative employment-relations work, and studies from under-represented contexts that speak to wider debates.

Journal-fit questions to answer before submission

• Can you state in two sentences how the study advances knowledge about HR, employment or industrial relations?
• Do recent Employee Relations articles engage with a similar problem, theory, population or method?
• Is the contribution clear for the journal’s international readership rather than only for one organisation?
• Does your manuscript fit one of the article classifications offered in the author guidelines?
• Can you comply with the journal’s word count, structured abstract and anonymisation requirements?

What Types of Articles Can Authors Submit?

At submission, the journal asks authors to choose a paper type/classification. The current author guidance identifies Research Paper as the article type and provides categories used to describe the manuscript, including research papers, viewpoints, technical papers, conceptual papers, case studies, literature reviews and general reviews. The practical implication is that authors should select the closest category in ScholarOne and make the manuscript’s purpose consistent with that classification.

A conventional empirical manuscript should clearly explain the research question, theoretical grounding, method, findings and contribution. A conceptual paper needs more than a narrative summary: it should develop or integrate ideas in a way that produces a defensible conceptual contribution. A literature review should have a genuine review purpose and transparent approach appropriate to the review design. Case-based work should show why the organisational experience matters analytically to the journal’s readers.

Preparing a Manuscript for Employee Relations

Length and file format

The official guidelines state that articles should be 3,000 to 7,000 words. The count includes the structured abstract, references, all text in tables and figures, and appendices, with an allowance of 280 words for each figure or table. Article files should be supplied in Microsoft Word format; a PDF may accompany the Word file but a PDF alone is not acceptable. LaTeX can be used when an accompanying PDF is provided.

Structured abstract and keywords

All submissions require a structured abstract. The mandatory headings are Purpose, Design/methodology/approach, Findings and Originality. Research limitations/implications, Practical implications and Social implications may be added when relevant. The entire abstract, including keywords and article classification, should not exceed 250 words. Authors may provide up to 12 short keywords.

References, tables and figures

References must use a recognized Harvard style; Emerald’s own Harvard style is acceptable. Tables are submitted separately from the main manuscript and should be numbered with Roman numerals, while the intended position is labelled in the manuscript. Figures should be supplied electronically at high quality, numbered consecutively and provided with clear captions and any necessary permissions or attribution.

Double-anonymous preparation

The manuscript should not contain author names or other identifying information that could compromise anonymous review. Acknowledgements and author biographies are uploaded separately. Self-citations should be written neutrally rather than in ways that explicitly reveal authorship. Each contributing author also needs an individual ScholarOne author account.

How to Submit to Employee Relations

The official route is the journal’s ScholarOne site accessed from Emerald. Emerald explicitly states that manuscripts should be submitted by the authors through this system—not by email and not by a third-party proxy. The corresponding author completes the submission and should add an ORCID where available.

1. Re-read the journal aims and scope and compare the manuscript with recent Employee Relations articles.
2. Bring the manuscript within the 3,000–7,000-word requirement and prepare the structured abstract and keywords.
3. Remove identifying information from the review manuscript and upload biographies/acknowledgements separately.
4. Check Harvard-style reference consistency, permissions, ethics statements, funding disclosure and conflicts of interest.
5. Open ScholarOne through the official journal page, create or use the author account, and submit directly.
6. Retain the manuscript number from the automated confirmation email for future correspondence and status checks.

A manuscript can be declined before external review if the editorial office considers it outside scope, non-compliant with submission policies or insufficient in language/manuscript quality. Treat the pre-submission check as part of the scholarly process, not a cosmetic formatting exercise.

What Happens After You Submit a Manuscript?

Every submission is screened by the journal’s editorial office. A paper that appears suitable is sent to at least two independent referees for double-anonymous peer review. After the reviews are returned, the editor can accept, request minor or major revisions, or decline the manuscript.

Emerald reports a 55-day time to first decision based on submissions between 1 April 2024 and 31 March 2025, and the author guidance describes a goal of informing authors of the first decision within 60 days. The publisher also reports an average 38 days from acceptance to publication, last updated April 2025. These are historical averages or goals, not guaranteed timelines for an individual paper.

The publisher-reported acceptance rate is 9.7% for submissions from 1 April 2024 to 31 March 2025. Authors should interpret that figure cautiously. It signals selectivity but does not predict the result for a manuscript; scope fit, research contribution, methods, reporting quality, reviewer assessment and revision quality all matter.

Open Access, APCs and Publication Charges

Employee Relations is a hybrid journal. Authors may use the standard publication route or choose gold open access once the paper is accepted. Under Emerald’s 2026 policy, the general hybrid-journal gold OA APC is £3,222 / US$4,351 / €3,710, plus VAT where applicable. Institutional agreements or vouchers may alter what an eligible author pays, so the current editorial-system amount and funding arrangements should be checked before selecting gold OA.

Emerald also offers green open access. Its current policy allows the author accepted manuscript to be made openly available without payment or an embargo once the article is published. This route is materially different from gold OA: the version of record remains on the publisher platform under the journal’s access model, while the accepted manuscript may be self-archived under Emerald’s green policy.

Research Ethics and Responsible Author Preparation

Emerald states that submitted work must be original, not simultaneously under consideration elsewhere and compliant with its research and publishing ethics policies. The publisher follows COPE guidance and may use Crossref Similarity Check. Conflicts of interest, research funding and relevant permissions should be disclosed, and authors remain accountable for the accuracy and integrity of the work.

For research involving human participants, authors must consider whether ethical approval is required and provide appropriate informed-consent and ethics statements. Emerald’s guidance expects enough detail to identify the reviewing ethics committee or board, approval information and relevant guidelines while preserving participant and reviewer anonymity.

Emerald’s current AI policy is especially important: generative AI must not be used to create or draft new manuscript material. Copy-editing an author’s own original text with generative AI may be permitted when used responsibly and transparently under the publisher’s stated policy. Large language models cannot be listed as authors. Researchers should read the live policy before submission because publisher rules on AI use can evolve.

How to Make a Manuscript More Journal-Aligned

As a practical publication-readiness step, begin with the journal’s intellectual conversation rather than its formatting checklist. Read a purposeful set of recent Employee Relations papers: at least a few on your topic and a few that use a comparable method. Note how authors define the employment-relations problem, frame the theoretical contribution, describe context and translate findings into implications.

How Contentxprtz Can Support Publication Readiness

Contentxprtz can support authors after the research and substantive scholarly argument are theirs. Ethical assistance may include academic editing, language polishing, manuscript-format checks, structured-abstract refinement, reference and citation consistency, figure/table presentation review, cover-letter editing, reviewer-response editing and a final publication-readiness assessment against the journal’s visible author requirements.

Support should never replace author responsibility. Contentxprtz does not guarantee acceptance, publication, peer-review success, indexing outcomes or citation performance, and it should not submit a manuscript as a proxy where the publisher requires direct author submission.

Authoritative Sources to Recheck Before Submission

• Employee Relations official journal page and author guidelines
• Scopus source profile (Source ID 144738)
• Emerald open-access and APC information
• Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE)