Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: Scopus, Metrics & Submission Guide

Key takeaways

• Published by Emerald Publishing; Editor-in-Chief listed by Emerald: Eddy Ng, Queen’s University.
• Journal identifiers supplied for this profile: ISSN 2040-7149, eISSN 2040-7157, Scopus Source ID 19900191744.
• Emerald lists Scopus and the Emerging Sources Citation Index among its indexing/ranking coverage.
• Current publisher-displayed metrics include 2025 CiteScore 5.3, 2025 Impact Factor 2.6 and 2025 five-year Impact Factor 3.0.
• Emerald reports a 20.6% acceptance rate for submissions received 1 April 2024–31 March 2025; this is not a manuscript-specific acceptance probability.
• Articles should normally be 6,000–8,000 words and include a structured abstract; references use a recognised Harvard style.
• The journal uses double-anonymous review and asks authors to remove identifying information from the review manuscript.
• Gold open access is optional and incurs a journal-specific APC after acceptance; Emerald also describes a green self-archiving route.

Journal information at a glance

Methodology and sources

This profile was prepared from the journal-specific record supplied with the task and the current Emerald Publishing page for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, including its author guidelines, indexing and metrics, editorial team, peer-review description and open-access information. The publisher page was used as the principal live source because it directly states the journal’s current requirements and displayed metrics.

What is Equality, Diversity and Inclusion?

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal is a specialist scholarly outlet concerned with how inequality and inclusion are produced, experienced, managed and contested in workplaces, organisations and wider society. The journal sits at the intersection of organisation and management research with social-science approaches to identity, power, discrimination, employment and institutional change.

That positioning matters for journal selection. A paper may mention diversity but still be a weak fit if diversity is merely a demographic control variable or background context. Stronger candidates typically place an equality, diversity, inclusion or inequality problem at the centre of the research question and make a contribution to how scholars or practitioners understand those dynamics.

Emerald’s current page names Eddy Ng of Queen’s University, Canada as Editor-in-Chief and lists an international editorial structure with associate editors and boards spanning multiple countries. For authors, this reinforces the journal’s international orientation; it does not mean every manuscript must be cross-national, but the contribution should usually be framed so that its significance extends beyond a very narrow local description.

Journal aims and scope

Emerald describes the journal as a platform for critical and rigorous exploration of equal-opportunities concerns. Its stated scope includes gender, ethnicity, class, disability, age, sexual orientation and religion, together with emerging forms of inequality, specifically in the context of society, organisations and work.

In practical terms, that scope can accommodate empirical, theoretical, conceptual and review-based work that investigates exclusion, discrimination, representation, identity, belonging, career outcomes, workplace systems, leadership, organisational policy or institutional structures. It can also accommodate research on intersecting inequalities, where multiple identity or structural dimensions combine rather than operate independently.

For a researcher deciding fit, the most important question is not simply “Is my topic about diversity?” but “What does my paper explain about equality, inequality, inclusion or exclusion that advances this journal’s conversation?” A manuscript on employee attitudes, for example, would need a substantive EDI mechanism or contribution rather than a generic workforce sample with demographic differences reported at the end.

Research directions that may align well

• Gender, work and careers
• Race, ethnicity and organisations
• Disability and workplace inclusion
• Age and employment inequality
• LGBTQIA+ inclusion and exclusion
• Religion and work
• Class and socioeconomic inequality
• Intersectionality and multiple identities
• Inclusive leadership and organisational practice
• Harassment, discrimination and power
• Equality policy and institutional change
• Emerging technology and employment inequality

Subjects covered and who should consider submitting

The journal is relevant to researchers working across management, human resource management, organisation studies, sociology of work, employment relations, diversity management, gender studies and related interdisciplinary areas. It may also be relevant to policy and professional audiences when the paper makes a rigorous contribution to equality and inclusion in organisational or work settings.

Scopus indexing, scholarly visibility and journal metrics

The supplied record identifies Scopus Source ID 19900191744, and Emerald currently lists Scopus among the journal’s ranking/indexing services. Emerald also lists the Emerging Sources Citation Index, ABI/Inform ProQuest, EBSCO products, IBSS, Sociological Abstracts and several other discovery services. These listings support discoverability, but researchers should distinguish database inclusion from any specific institutional rule about acceptable journals.

At the time this profile was prepared, Emerald displayed a 2025 CiteScore of 5.3 and a 2026 CiteScore Tracker of 4.0. It also displayed a 2025 Journal Impact Factor of 2.6 and a 2025 five-year Impact Factor of 3.0. The tracker is a current-year indicator that changes as the year progresses; it should not be treated as a completed annual CiteScore.

The Emerald page reviewed here did not display SJR, SNIP or a Scopus quartile. Those values should therefore be checked in the current applicable database rather than copied from an unverified third-party ranking page. This distinction is especially important for PhD scholars whose institutions require a particular quartile.

How to interpret the acceptance and timeline statistics

Emerald reports a 20.6% acceptance rate for submissions received from 1 April 2024 through 31 March 2025. That figure describes the journal’s historical submission flow; it cannot predict the outcome for a particular paper. Emerald’s metrics area also reports 74 days to first decision, while the author-guidance section states a goal of informing authors of a first decision within 60 days. These are not necessarily contradictory because they are described differently and may derive from different reporting conventions or periods. Neither should be treated as a guaranteed deadline.

What types of articles does the journal publish?

Emerald’s submission page asks authors to select an article type and a paper category. Current article-type options shown include Original Article, Professional Insights, Impact Article and Viewpoints. The author guidelines also describe research paper, viewpoint, technical paper, conceptual paper and review paper categories.

Manuscript and formatting requirements

The following points are journal-specific requirements stated in Emerald’s current author guidelines. Authors should always perform a final check on the live page immediately before uploading because publisher instructions can be updated.

• Length: normally 6,000–8,000 words, including structured abstract, references, text in tables/figures and appendices; Emerald asks authors to allow 280 words for each figure or table.
• Files: article files should be supplied in Microsoft Word. A PDF may accompany the Word file but is not accepted alone. LaTeX may be used with an accompanying PDF.
• Structured abstract: mandatory headings include Purpose, Design/methodology/approach, Findings and Originality; limitations, practical implications and social implications may be added when applicable.
• Abstract limit: maximum 250 words in total, with the guideline stating that this total includes keywords and article classification.
• Keywords: up to 12 short, relevant keywords.
• References: a recognised Harvard style; Emerald permits its own Harvard version and asks for complete, accurate and consistent citations.
• Author details: all contributing authors must be entered in ScholarOne; author biographies and acknowledgements, if supplied, are uploaded separately.
• Funding: external funding sources and the funder’s role should be stated in the acknowledgements.
• Double-anonymous preparation: the review manuscript should not contain author-identifying information, including names in figures or captions.

Submission process: what authors should do

1. Recheck scope. Compare the manuscript’s central question and contribution with the journal’s aims and recent publications.
2. Prepare an anonymised manuscript. Remove author names, biographies, acknowledgements and other identifying clues from the review file.
3. Check format. Confirm word length, structured abstract, keywords, references, tables, figures, permissions and supplementary files.
4. Confirm ethics. Include required ethical approval or consent information where human-participant research is involved; declare funding and conflicts of interest as applicable.
5. Submit through ScholarOne. Emerald states that the corresponding author must submit directly through the journal’s editorial system accessed from Emerald.
6. Keep the manuscript number. The successful-submission email provides a manuscript identifier for future correspondence.

Peer-review process and editorial decisions

Each submission is first checked by the editor. Emerald notes that a manuscript may be declined or returned at this stage if it does not fit the aims and scope or if the language/manuscript quality is too low. Papers considered suitable are sent to at least two independent referees under the journal’s double-anonymous peer-review model.

After reviewer reports are received, the editor may accept, request minor revisions, request major revisions or decline the manuscript. Authors should therefore plan for revision as a normal part of scholarly publishing rather than interpreting a revision request as failure.

As a practical readiness step, prepare a clean evidence trail before submission: preserve analysis files, ethics documentation, permissions, data-management records and source materials. If revisions are requested, this makes it easier to answer reviewer questions accurately and consistently.

Open access, copyright and publication fees

Emerald currently offers both gold and green open-access routes across its journals. For this journal, an author can choose gold open access after acceptance. Emerald states that this is when the APC is charged; the exact price varies by journal and should be checked in the current APC price list or editorial system. Gold-OA articles are published under a CC BY 4.0 licence according to the publisher’s guidance.

Emerald also describes a green route under which the author accepted manuscript can be self-archived in line with its policy. Authors working under funder or institutional mandates should confirm which manuscript version and repository conditions satisfy their specific obligation.

If gold OA is not selected, authors should not assume that a publication fee is due. Emerald specifically warns that it asks for publication payment only when the author has chosen the gold route, and only after acceptance. This is useful fraud-prevention information for researchers who receive unsolicited payment requests.

Research ethics, originality and AI use

Emerald states that its publishing-ethics approach follows guidance from the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Submissions should be original, should not be under consideration elsewhere, and should disclose relevant conflicts of interest. Authors are responsible for obtaining third-party permissions before submission where copyrighted material is reused.

For research involving human participants, authors are expected to consider whether ethical approval is required and to include appropriate information in the submission. The publisher also encourages transparent research practices under the Transparency and Openness Promotion (TOP) framework, including appropriate citation of data, code and methods and attention to privacy and data-protection requirements.

AI policy needs particular attention. Emerald’s current guidance states that large language models cannot be credited as authors. Its page further says generative-AI copywriting that creates new submission material is not permitted, while copy-editing an author’s own original work may be permitted subject to the publisher’s transparency and responsibility principles. Authors using AI-assisted tools should therefore read the live policy before submission rather than relying on a generic AI disclosure practice.

How to decide whether the journal suits your manuscript

Common reasons a manuscript may be unsuitable

Potential problems include a topic that sits outside the journal’s core EDI conversation; a descriptive manuscript without a clear theoretical or analytical contribution; weak integration of inequality or inclusion into the research question; a literature review that does not establish a meaningful gap; methods that cannot support the claims; or failure to follow the journal’s submission and anonymity requirements. The journal’s acceptance rate should not be used as a substitute for this fit analysis.

How to prepare a stronger, journal-aligned manuscript

As a practical publication-readiness step, read a focused set of recent EDI papers before finalising the manuscript. Look at how authors frame the problem, which theories are active in the journal, how methods are justified, how intersectionality or context is handled, and what editors appear to regard as a meaningful contribution. This is not a formal journal rule; it is a reliable way to avoid sending a technically competent paper to the wrong intellectual conversation.

How Contentxprtz can ethically support publication readiness

Contentxprtz can support authors with manuscript assessment, academic editing, proofreading, language polishing, journal-format alignment, reference and citation checks, cover-letter editing, reviewer-response editing and publication-readiness review. For researchers writing in English as an additional language, careful language editing can help the manuscript communicate its existing contribution more clearly without changing the underlying scholarship.

Support should remain ethical and author-led. That means preserving the researcher’s ideas, data, interpretation and accountability; not fabricating results or citations; not inventing authorship; and not submitting the manuscript through a proxy. No editing or publication-assistance provider can guarantee journal acceptance, peer-review success or publication.

Official sources used

• Emerald Publishing — Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal (aims/scope, author guidelines, editorial team, metrics, peer review, OA and submission information).
• Scopus source profile — Source ID 19900191744 (journal record link supplied with the task).
• Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (publishing-ethics framework referenced by Emerald).

About the author

Dr. Arjun Menon

Research-Driven Business Analyst & Writer

Dr. Arjun Menon is a research-driven writer and professional analyst with a focus on accuracy, relevance, and practical interpretation. His content combines structured research with clear explanation, helping readers engage with business topics through dependable and well-informed insights.