The Leadership Quarterly: Scopus, Scope & Submission Guide

Quick Answer: What Is The Leadership Quarterly?

The Leadership Quarterly is an international social-science journal published by Elsevier. Its official scope is centered on leadership as a phenomenon, the ways scholars study leadership, and the practical implications of leadership research. It welcomes disciplinary and multidisciplinary perspectives rather than restricting leadership research to one management tradition.

For a researcher, that breadth creates opportunity but also raises the standard for fit. A paper can draw on organizational behavior, applied psychology, strategy, political science, sociology, behavioral economics, anthropology, history, or methodology, yet the leadership contribution must remain clear. The journal publishes empirical and theoretical work, meta-analyses, reviews, critiques, methodological articles, adversarial collaborations, and selected short communications.

It is currently listed by Elsevier as indexed in Scopus and SSCI. Before submission, confirm the latest author guide, metrics, fees, and any special-issue instructions because these are time-sensitive.

Key Takeaways for Prospective Authors

• Publisher: Elsevier; print ISSN 1048-9843 and online ISSN 1873-3409.
• Scopus: indexed; supplied Scopus Source ID 21149.
• Scope: multidisciplinary leadership research spanning social, behavioral, management, political, economic, historical, anthropological, and methodological perspectives.
• Metrics: Elsevier currently displays CiteScore 18.3 and Impact Factor 9.7; institutional sources report 2024 SJR 5.393 and SNIP 3.826.
• Article types: full-length articles and short communications, with regular issues accommodating multiple epistemological and methodological approaches.
• Peer review: single anonymized, normally with at least two external reviewers when a paper proceeds beyond editorial assessment.
• Publishing model: hybrid; gold open access is available, while the subscription route carries no author publication fee.
• Fit: the strongest candidates make a distinct contribution to understanding leadership, not merely a general management or workplace topic.

Journal Information at a Glance

The table below separates stable identifiers from time-sensitive indicators. Where a metric has a known reporting year, that year is stated explicitly.

Metrics and editorial information can change between reporting cycles. If a doctoral programme, university, funder, or promotion policy requires a particular database status or quartile, use the current official database record rather than a screenshot or old directory entry.

How This Guide Was Researched

Journal facts were checked primarily against Elsevier’s official ScienceDirect journal page, official Guide for Authors, open-access information, journal insights, editorial-board information, and issue listings. The supplied Scopus record was used to identify Source ID 21149. For year-labeled SJR, SNIP, and category quartiles not shown in Elsevier’s public summary, institutional library journal guides reporting Scopus 2024 metrics were used as secondary evidence.

Because indexing, metrics, APCs, editors, timelines, and policies can change, this page is a selection aid rather than a substitute for the journal’s live submission system. Researchers should reconfirm time-sensitive information immediately before submission.

The Leadership Quarterly Aims, Scope and Research Community

The official aims and scope describe a social-science journal devoted to advancing knowledge of leadership itself, the methods used to investigate it, and its practical consequences. The journal explicitly invites work from psychology, management, political science, sociology, economics, anthropology, history, and methodology, and it also welcomes multidisciplinary research.

This is broader than a conventional “management leadership” outlet. Leadership can be formal or informal and may occur across different kinds of groups and organizations. The scope even allows consideration of non-human leadership. What unifies suitable submissions is a substantive leadership question: how leaders emerge, influence, decide, coordinate, signal, shape outcomes, are perceived, or are studied; how followers and contexts affect leadership; or how methods can improve causal and descriptive knowledge in the field.

Research themes that can plausibly fit

• leader emergence, selection, identity, traits, behavior, influence, and decision-making;
• leader–follower processes, social exchange, power, trust, values, ethics, and perceptions;
• strategic and top-management leadership, including crisis and political leadership;
• team, collective, shared, informal, and networked leadership;
• leadership across cultures, institutions, historical periods, and non-WEIRD contexts;
• gender, diversity, inequality, and barriers to leadership roles;
• leadership development and practical implications grounded in strong evidence;
• methods for identifying, measuring, and causally estimating leadership phenomena.

A manuscript can still be out of scope even when it concerns managers. For example, a general employee-engagement study with no meaningful leadership construct, theory, or leadership-specific contribution may fit another organizational journal better.

Understanding Its Scopus Coverage and Journal Metrics

The journal is listed by Elsevier as covered by Scopus and the Social Sciences Citation Index. The source record provided for this article identifies Scopus Source ID 21149. For researchers whose institutions require a Scopus-indexed journal, that is directly relevant, but database recognition should still be verified against the current institutional rule because some policies specify active coverage years, subject quartiles, or a particular reporting cycle.

Elsevier’s journal page checked on 10 August 2026 displays a CiteScore of 18.3 and an Impact Factor of 9.7. Institutional library guides explicitly label the 18.3 CiteScore, SJR 5.393, and SNIP 3.826 as 2024 Scopus metrics and list Q1 positions across the journal’s four major Scopus categories. A quartile is category-relative, so “Q1” should be stated with its year and category context rather than treated as a timeless badge.

Editorial interpretation: these figures indicate strong citation visibility within the journal’s fields, which can make the journal attractive to authors seeking a widely read leadership outlet. They do not indicate that a particular manuscript is likely to be accepted, nor do they replace evaluation of scope, contribution, design quality, or transparency.

What Does The Leadership Quarterly Publish?

The journal’s regular issues accept a notably broad set of scholarly forms. Full-length articles may include deductive or inductive empirical studies, theoretical papers, meta-analyses, systematic or narrative reviews, substantial critiques and reflections, applied methodological contributions, and adversarial collaborations framed as exchanges or debates.

The official guide says these full-length manuscripts should normally be 12,000–15,000 words inclusive of abstract, text, figures, tables, and references. Longer papers can be considered when the scale of the contribution warrants the length.

Short communications, normally 5,000–10,000 words inclusive, can report important basic discoveries where little theory exists, replication studies, or strong and adequately powered null-result studies. That policy is useful for researchers working on reproducibility or informative negative findings because novelty is not defined only as a positive statistical effect.

Special issues and the Leadership Quarterly Yearly Review may have different instructions. Authors responding to a call for papers should follow the call-specific requirements rather than assuming the regular-issue word ranges apply unchanged.

Is This Journal a Good Match for Your Research?

A suitable manuscript usually has a clear leadership-centered contribution, a research design capable of supporting its claims, and a connection to debates that readers of The Leadership Quarterly are likely to recognize. The question to ask is: What will a leadership scholar understand differently after reading this paper?

These are practical fit examples, not editorial rulings. Before submitting, compare the manuscript with several recent papers that use related theories, constructs, units of analysis, and methods. A topic that appears within the broad scope can still be a poor match if the journal rarely engages the specific question or evidentiary approach.

Preparing a Manuscript for The Leadership Quarterly

The official author instructions require editable source files. Word submissions should use .doc or .docx, while LaTeX submissions use .tex; a PDF is not accepted as the source file. Word manuscripts should be single-column. The guide also emphasizes spelling and grammar checks before submission.

Title page, abstract and keywords

The title page should include a concise and informative title, author names in the same order as the submission system, full affiliations, and a clearly designated corresponding author. The abstract must be factual and no longer than 250 words. Authors must supply 1–7 English keywords for indexing.

Tables, sections and contribution statements

Tables must be editable rather than embedded as images and should be numbered, captioned, cited in the text, and used without unnecessary duplication. Manuscripts should use clearly defined sections. The corresponding author is also required to provide a CRediT contributor statement where applicable.

References

At initial submission the journal does not impose rigid reference formatting as long as references are complete and consistent. In-text citations should follow APA style, with the guide referring authors to APA 7th edition. The reference list should be alphabetical and then chronological; DOIs are encouraged. This gives authors some flexibility at first submission while still requiring careful bibliographic accuracy.

What Happens After You Submit a Manuscript?

The Leadership Quarterly uses single-anonymized peer review. The first substantive gate is editorial assessment: editors decide whether the submission is suitable for the journal before external review. If it proceeds, it is typically sent to at least two independent reviewers for scientific-quality assessment, and editors make the final acceptance or rejection decision.

Elsevier’s current journal insights page provides historical workflow indicators of 5 days from submission to first decision, 83 days to decision after review, 457 days from submission to acceptance, and 23 days from acceptance to online publication. These are journal-level reported indicators, not promises for an individual paper; complexity, revision rounds, reviewer availability, and special-issue handling can produce very different experiences.

After acceptance, proofs are sent to the corresponding author, and the guide asks for proof corrections within two days. The proof stage is intended for checking typesetting, completeness, tables, figures, and copyediting—not for major post-acceptance rewriting without editor approval.

Editorial Screening: Why Strong Papers Can Still Be Declined Early

The journal does not publish a formula for desk-rejection decisions, so authors should not treat any checklist as an official scoring rubric. Still, its scope, article categories, and peer-review description make several preparation questions practical: Is leadership the central phenomenon? Is the contribution distinguishable from adjacent management research? Are claims proportionate to the design? Does the manuscript explain why the question matters to leadership theory or evidence? Are methods, data, limitations, and references sufficiently transparent for expert review?

As a publication-readiness step, remove avoidable reasons for editorial friction: an abstract that overclaims, unclear hypotheses or research questions, weak positioning against current leadership literature, inconsistent construct definitions, unsupported causal language, incomplete reporting, or a manuscript that ignores the journal’s length and file requirements.

Publication Ethics, Authorship and Generative AI

The journal follows Elsevier’s publishing ethics policies. Submission implies that the work has not been published previously except for permitted forms such as preprints, abstracts, lectures, theses, or registered reports; that it is not simultaneously under consideration elsewhere; and that all authors and relevant authorities approve the submission.

Authorship requires substantial contribution, critical drafting or revision, final approval, and accountability. Competing interests and funding sources must be disclosed. Elsevier also states that manuscripts may be checked with screening tools for compliance with publishing policies.

For generative AI, authors remain responsible for accuracy, originality, impartiality, source verification, privacy, and intellectual-property compliance. If AI or AI-assisted tools are used in manuscript preparation beyond basic grammar, spelling, or reference checking, the guide requires a disclosure statement before the references. AI tools cannot be listed as authors. The current policy also states that reviewers and editors are not permitted to use generative AI tools such as ChatGPT in peer-review or manuscript evaluation because of confidentiality and author-rights concerns.

Open Access, APCs and Author Costs

The Leadership Quarterly is a hybrid journal. Authors can publish gold open access or choose subscription publication. Elsevier states that the publication choice does not affect peer review or acceptance.

On 10 August 2026, Elsevier’s official journal page lists the open-access article publishing charge as USD 4,290 excluding taxes. The amount presented during submission may be lower depending on institutional agreements, country, funder, or other eligibility. Under the subscription route, Elsevier states that no publication fee is charged to authors.

The open-access page lists CC BY, CC BY-NC, and CC BY-NC-ND licensing options, subject to applicable requirements. Because APCs, agreements, and funder mandates can change, authors should check the price shown in the live submission workflow before making a budget decision.

Recent Research Signals and Current Calls

Recent journal content illustrates the breadth of the scope: papers and reviews have addressed leader–follower value congruence, social exchange theory in leadership, top-management-team change, ethical leadership in the Global South, team coordination, and strategic leadership in China. Articles in press and 2026 publications also include collective-leadership emergence, CEO responsible leadership, corpus-linguistic methods for leadership studies, and research on influence perceptions.

Elsevier’s call-for-papers page currently lists a special issue titled Grounded in Causality: Elevating Evidence for Leadership Practice, with a submission deadline of 22 November 2026. Calls can close or change, so authors should use the official calls page rather than relying on an archived announcement.

A Practical Pre-Submission Checklist

The journal’s submission checklist and author guide can be translated into the following working review. This is a preparation aid, not an editorial guarantee.

How to Strengthen Journal Alignment Before Submission

Start with contribution rather than formatting. Read several recent papers that are genuinely close to your topic and map three things: the leadership problem they treat as consequential, the evidence they consider persuasive, and the theory or explanation they advance. Then test your manuscript against that pattern without imitating any one paper.

For empirical work, make the link between design and inference explicit. If the design is observational, avoid causal language that the data cannot support. If the paper is a review or meta-analysis, explain the evidence-selection logic, heterogeneity, boundary conditions, and what the synthesis changes about leadership theory. If it is methodological, show why the method solves a recurring problem in leadership research rather than merely presenting a generic statistical technique.

Finally, make the first page earn editorial attention: a precise problem, a clear gap or tension, and a contribution that is specific enough to evaluate. This is general publication guidance informed by the journal’s scope, not an official acceptance formula.

How Contentxprtz Can Support Publication Readiness

Contentxprtz can provide ethical manuscript-preparation support when a researcher already owns the research, analysis, and scholarly conclusions but needs help presenting them clearly and consistently. Relevant support may include manuscript editing, academic proofreading, journal formatting, reference and citation checks, clarity review, journal-fit discussion, cover-letter editing, and response-to-reviewer editing.

For a manuscript intended for The Leadership Quarterly, support can focus on whether the leadership contribution is easy to identify, whether the abstract accurately reflects the study, whether terminology is consistent, whether tables and references meet the stated requirements, and whether the English is clear without changing the author’s scientific meaning. Researchers remain responsible for data, citations, claims, authorship, ethical compliance, and the final submission.

Final Assessment: Who Should Consider This Journal?

The Leadership Quarterly is most relevant to researchers whose manuscript makes leadership—not simply management, workplace behavior, or organizational context—the central scholarly phenomenon. Its multidisciplinary scope can suit PhD scholars, early-career researchers, established academics, and interdisciplinary teams working with empirical, theoretical, review, meta-analytic, methodological, replication, or debate-based approaches.

Its Scopus and SSCI coverage and strong displayed citation metrics may satisfy visibility requirements for many institutions, but authors should confirm the exact indexing and metric criteria used by their university or funder. Before submitting, use the current official Guide for Authors, verify any special-issue rules, and make sure the manuscript’s claimed contribution is proportionate to the evidence.

Official Sources and Verification Links

Use the live official pages below for final pre-submission verification: journal homepage, Guide for Authors, open-access options, journal insights, editorial board, and Scopus Source ID 21149.