Transnational Corporations Review: Scopus, Scope, Metrics & Author Guide

Key Takeaways

• Publisher: Elsevier from 2023; recent issue pages also identify Zhejiang University in copyright information.
• Identifiers: ISSN 1918-6444, online ISSN 1925-2099; supplied Scopus Source ID 21100923467.
• Scope: transnational corporations, FDI, trade, innovation, global value chains, development and economic, institutional, social and environmental impacts.
• Open access: current ScienceDirect and DOAJ records identify the journal as open access; DOAJ records OA publication from 2023.
• Fees: DOAJ, updated 27 April 2026, lists publication fees up to US$1,400 and a waiver policy; verify the live charge before submission.
• Metrics: retrieved ScienceDirect pages display CiteScore 4.8 and Impact Factor 1.8; current SJR, SNIP and quartile were not verified from a current authoritative metric page in this review.
• Fit matters: authors should compare the manuscript with the journal's aims, scope and recent papers before formatting for submission.

Journal Information at a Glance

What This Page Covers

• Aims and scope
• Scopus and indexing
• Metrics and quartile caution
• Article types
• Open access and APCs
• Peer review
• Submission preparation
• Journal-fit evaluation
• Publication ethics

Methodology and Sources

This profile was prepared from the supplied Scopus-style journal record plus authoritative journal and publisher information. The principal sources reviewed were the current ScienceDirect journal pages, the ScienceDirect editorial-board page, the DOAJ record, the Scopus source profile, and the legacy Taylor & Francis journal page for pre-2023 historical context.

What Does Transnational Corporations Review Publish?

TNCR is designed around questions created by cross-border corporate activity. Its official legacy aims-and-scope description emphasizes economic analysis of transnational corporations and welcomes refereed work on foreign direct investment, trade, innovation and policies associated with TNCs. That framing extends beyond firm performance alone: the journal is interested in how transnational corporate activity interacts with institutions, societies, environments and development outcomes.

A distinctive part of the journal's historical positioning is its attention to emerging markets. The scope is not limited to corporations headquartered in advanced economies entering developing markets; it also considers emerging-market multinationals and their cross-border operations. For authors, this means that a manuscript can be geographically diverse, but its analytical connection to international investment, corporate transnationalization, trade, global production, policy or development should be explicit.

Editorial interpretation: the journal's recent issues show a wider empirical economics and development footprint than the title alone might suggest. However, broad economic topics are stronger candidates when the paper maintains a convincing connection to international business, trade, investment, transnationalization, global production or related policy.

Transnational Corporations Review Aims and Scope: How to Judge Fit

For journal selection, read the scope as a set of research relationships rather than a keyword list. A manuscript on innovation may fit if it studies how digitalization shapes enterprise innovation in an internationally relevant context; a paper on governance may fit if it links institutions to FDI, multinational behavior or international production; and a development paper may fit if it analyzes how international capital, trade or transnational corporations affect growth, inclusion or sustainability.

Representative themes that appear consistent with the verified scope

• Foreign direct investment determinants, consequences and policy.
• Multinational and transnational enterprise strategy, governance and performance.
• Emerging-market multinationals and outward internationalization.
• International trade, trade policy, global value chains and export performance.
• Technology transfer, innovation, digitalization and international knowledge flows.
• Institutions, governance and the business environment for cross-border investment.
• Development, poverty, inclusive growth and sustainable-development implications of FDI and trade.
• Corporate social responsibility and environmental or social effects of transnational activity.

Topics that may need stronger justification

Purely domestic corporate studies, generic marketing research, local public administration, general macroeconomics or finance studies without a meaningful cross-border, investment, trade, multinational-enterprise or transnationalization dimension may be harder to align. That is an interpretation, not an official exclusion list. Authors should inspect several recent papers and the current aims-and-scope page before deciding.

Understanding Its Scopus Coverage and Journal Metrics

The supplied record gives Scopus Source ID 21100923467, and the legacy publisher page identifies Scopus among the journal's indexing services. It also historically listed ESCI, ABDC, EBSCO, RePEc, ERIH PLUS, Crossref and other services. Because indexing lists can be changed or discontinued, the safest practice is to verify the journal directly in the live database that matters to your institution.

Recent ScienceDirect journal pages retrieved for this profile display 4.8 CiteScore and 1.8 Impact Factor. The retrieved publisher snippet did not show the associated reporting year. That matters: CiteScore and Journal Impact Factor are annual metrics, and a number without a year can be misleading. This article therefore does not label those values as 2025 or 2026 figures.

For PhD, promotion, grant or institutional compliance, save evidence of the database record and date checked. Universities may apply their own rules about active coverage, discontinuation, category quartiles, accepted metric years, journal lists or publication dates.

Recent Research Published by the Journal

Recent ScienceDirect issues show the breadth of the journal's current portfolio. Examples from 2025 include research on trade shocks and macroeconomic performance, natural resources and economic growth in Asia, digital transformation and enterprise innovation, infrastructure and African global-value-chain participation, FDI and corporate social responsibility in family business, digitalization and FDI inflows, and the relationship between geopolitical conditions and financial or economic outcomes.

As a practical publication-readiness step, read at least five to ten papers from the latest volumes that are closest to your topic. Note the research questions, data level, theoretical framing, methodological sophistication, country coverage and policy implications. That comparison is usually more informative than matching keywords to the journal title.

Article Types and Manuscript Positioning

Current ScienceDirect issues clearly publish Research Article content, and a 2024 retrospective paper is labeled as a Review article. The journal also hosts special issues and article collections. Older volumes contain editorials, notes and other categories. Because editorial menus change, authors should not assume every historically published category is open for unsolicited submission today.

Before drafting to the journal, identify the article type in the current Guide for Authors and build the manuscript around that category. For an empirical research article, the research gap, hypotheses or propositions, methods, results and contribution should be explicit. For a review article, the synthesis method, selection logic and novel organizing contribution should be clear rather than presenting a descriptive literature summary.

Open Access, Copyright and Publication Fees

Current ScienceDirect pages mark Transnational Corporations Review as open access. DOAJ states that the journal began publishing in open access in 2023 and lists CC BY or CC BY-NC-ND licenses. DOAJ's record, updated 27 April 2026, lists publication fees of up to US$1,400 and notes that a waiver policy exists.

Authors should treat the fee as a current directory-record indication, not a universal invoice. The amount payable can depend on the article, license, country, taxes, waiver status, institutional agreement or publisher policy. Confirm the exact APC and waiver terms on the current journal page before submission or, at minimum, before accepting an offer to publish.

Do not confuse an APC with a guarantee of acceptance. Payment in a legitimate open-access model occurs within a publishing workflow governed by editorial and peer-review decisions; the fee does not replace scholarly assessment.

What Is Known About Peer Review?

DOAJ's current record links the journal under anonymous peer review. The legacy Taylor & Francis page stated that every article went through double-blind peer review. Because the publishing platform changed to Elsevier in 2023, the exact current terminology and manuscript anonymization requirements should be verified in the live Guide for Authors.

The journal's former publisher page also displayed historical acceptance and decision-time statistics. Those figures should not be used to predict the present Elsevier workflow. A current official average review duration or acceptance rate was not verified in the current authoritative pages reviewed here.

As a practical preparation step, create a clean main manuscript, separate title-page information if required, remove identifying metadata when anonymous review is instructed, and make sure tables, figures, appendices and supplementary materials cannot inadvertently reveal author identities.

How to Prepare a Submission for Transnational Corporations Review

Use the current Guide for Authors as the controlling document. Do not rely on an old Taylor & Francis submission route, archived email address or third-party journal directory. Publisher transitions are exactly when stale submission instructions create avoidable errors.

1. Confirm fit first. Compare the manuscript's research question and contribution with the current aims and recent papers.
2. Select the current article type. Check whether your intended category is open and whether special restrictions apply.
3. Download or review the latest author instructions. Confirm word limits, abstract structure, keyword rules, reference style, tables, figures and supplementary files.
4. Prepare declarations. Include funding, conflicts of interest, author contributions, data availability, ethics approval or consent statements where relevant.
5. Check anonymity requirements. If the review process requires anonymization, remove author-identifying details from the review file while preserving them in the title-page or submission system as instructed.
6. Audit citations and references. Every in-text citation should match the reference list; verify DOIs and bibliographic details where possible.
7. Submit through the current journal route. Follow the ScienceDirect journal page's active submission link and keep confirmation records.

Journal-Fit Checklist: Should You Submit Here?

Reasons to reconsider the journal

Reconsider if the manuscript is only loosely related to international business or FDI, if the principal contribution belongs to a highly specialized discipline outside the journal's readership, if recent TNCR articles show little methodological or topical overlap, or if your institution requires a specific quartile or index that you have not verified for the publication year.

How to Strengthen a Journal-Aligned Manuscript

Alignment begins with contribution, not formatting. The introduction should identify a research problem that matters to the journal's readers, explain what existing studies do not resolve, and state what the manuscript adds. The literature review should build a conceptual argument rather than become a catalogue of citations. Methods should be reproducible and appropriate to the research question, while the results and discussion should distinguish evidence from interpretation.

For TNCR in particular, authors can strengthen fit by making the international or transnational mechanism explicit. If the paper studies digitalization, explain why the findings matter for international production, FDI, global value chains, emerging-market firms or cross-border policy. If it studies governance, show how institutions alter investment, multinational strategy, trade or development outcomes. If it studies a single country, explain what transferable insight the case contributes.

Policy implications should follow from the evidence. Avoid generic recommendations such as “governments should improve policy” unless the analysis identifies a mechanism, actor and actionable implication. Likewise, do not inflate novelty. A precise contribution that extends, tests or contextualizes previous work is more credible than claiming that a study is the first without a defensible search basis.

Publication Ethics and Author Responsibilities

The current journal operates on Elsevier's platform, so authors should follow the journal-specific Guide for Authors together with applicable Elsevier ethics and publishing policies. General responsibilities include accurate authorship, transparent conflicts of interest and funding, originality, proper citation, responsible data handling, appropriate ethical approval where human or animal research is involved, and truthful reporting of methods and results.

AI-assisted tools should not be used to fabricate data, references, reviewers, methods or findings. Any use of generative AI should follow the journal and publisher's current disclosure rules. Authors remain responsible for every claim, citation and interpretation in the submitted manuscript.

Professional editing is compatible with ethical publication when it improves language, organization, formatting and clarity while preserving the author's ideas and research responsibility. Editing should never create fake results, conceal plagiarism, invent citations or impersonate an author in the scholarly record.

Practical Journal-Selection Examples

Pre-Submission Checklist

What Happens After You Submit a Manuscript?

The precise current workflow should be taken from the live journal system, but authors can generally expect an initial editorial assessment before external peer review. A manuscript can be declined at this stage when it falls outside scope, lacks sufficient novelty or rigor, is not prepared to an acceptable scholarly standard, or does not meet essential submission requirements.

If the paper proceeds to peer review, respond to revision requests systematically. Create a point-by-point response, identify where each revision appears, distinguish substantive changes from wording edits, and provide evidence when disagreeing with a reviewer. Do not treat reviewer comments as an adversarial checklist; they often reveal where the manuscript's logic, methods or explanation is unclear to an expert reader.

A current official average review duration and acceptance rate were not verified for the current Elsevier workflow. Avoid planning around historical averages as if they were commitments.

How Contentxprtz Can Support Publication Readiness

Contentxprtz can support authors preparing for Transnational Corporations Review through ethical services such as manuscript assessment, academic editing, language polishing, journal-alignment review, reference consistency, formatting checks, cover-letter editing, reviewer-response editing and thesis-to-article preparation. The useful objective is to make the research easier for editors and reviewers to evaluate, not to manipulate a journal decision.

Support can be especially valuable for first-time authors, ESL researchers and PhD scholars who have strong research but need help turning a thesis chapter or draft into a focused journal article. That may involve reducing repetition, clarifying the research gap, improving transitions, tightening the methods explanation, strengthening the discussion, checking claims against evidence and aligning presentation with current author instructions.