Journals for Corporate Governance and Firm Value Research: SSCI, ABDC, Scopus and EI Options, With and Without Article Charges

The email says: special issue on corporate governance and firm value, SSCI indexed, submissions reviewed within three weeks, article charge payable on acceptance. Most authors read "SSCI indexed" as a statement about the special issue. It is not. At best it is a claim about the journal, and a claim is not a record.

Two things follow for management and finance authors. First, check the journal's ISSN in the index itself before you answer any invitation, not the special issue page. Second, be suspicious of the review promise: three weeks is not peer review in this discipline, where a normal first decision takes months. This page is the list we actually give clients who ask where governance work should go, grouped by what it costs rather than by index, because in this subject the money question decides the shortlist.

How to read a quartile before you read the list

Three systems are in play. The Scopus quartile comes from Scimago, inside a Scopus subject category. The JCR quartile comes from Clarivate, inside a Web of Science category, using the impact factor. The ABDC list grades business journals separately, and in accounting and governance it often decides internal credit.

The index tier matters more than any quartile. An ESCI journal shows an impact factor and a quartile that look exactly like an SSCI one, so an ESCI Q1 will not satisfy a rule asking for SSCI. Where the tier is not recorded, the tables say so rather than guess. Settling this before the cover letter is the first step in Journal Submission Preparation.

Swipe the table sideways to see every column.

Not sure whether the journal you picked is still indexed? Run it through the Predatory Journal Checker at ai.researchramp.com, or send us the title on WhatsApp or WeChat for a same-day check. Two minutes to spare instead? Try the Smart Quiz.

WhatsApp us Add us on WeChat

×

Connect with Research Ramp on WeChat

Scan the QR code to add us on WeChat.

Indexed conference routes in corporate governance

Thin, and worth saying plainly. Governance and accounting run on working paper conferences that produce no indexed proceedings, so the series that do index here are general management and business technology venues. Indexing is decided one volume at a time.

Turning a conference paper into a journal article in this field

Almost every governance paper starts life at a conference or in a working paper series, so this question comes up more here than anywhere else. The rules are settled, and breaking them costs the paper.

1. Extension is allowed, duplication is not. Every journal in the tables above accepts a paper that was presented at a conference. What none of them accepts is the same article, reformatted, with a longer literature review.
2. Expect to add a third to a half. In this field that usually means extending the sample period, adding a second country or exchange, adding the endogeneity work the conference version skipped, or adding a mechanism test rather than reporting only the headline association.
3. Cite the conference version openly. Name it in the manuscript, in the cover letter and in the acknowledgements, with the venue and year. Reviewers in this discipline attend the same conferences and will recognise the paper.
4. Abstract-only proceedings are the easy case. If the conference published only an abstract, nothing was published in the copyright sense and the journal version is unconstrained. Say so explicitly in the cover letter.
5. Check what the conference published. Some proceedings publish the full paper with a DOI, which is a publication. If yours did, the extension bar applies and the similarity report will find it.

Getting that declaration and the extension right before submission is Manuscript Preparation Support, and where the extension needs a second market or a co-author with database access, that is Collaboration Matching.

What gets accepted in this field, and what gets rejected

Which corporate governance journals accept secondary data or publicly available datasets?

Effectively all of them, because this is a secondary data field by construction. Annual reports, exchange filings, board disclosures, Compustat, CSMAR, Refinitiv, Orbis and hand-collected data from published documents are the normal inputs, and no journal in the tables above expects primary collection.

Two conditions apply. Name the database, the version or extraction date and every sample filter, and be explicit where data are hand-collected, including who collected them and how disagreements were resolved.

Do I need ethics approval for a corporate governance paper using open data?

Usually not, because published company filings and commercial financial databases are not personal data in the sense that triggers review. The decision belongs to your institution rather than to you or the journal, so check your own policy rather than assuming.

Approval is required once people enter the study: interviews with directors, surveys of board members, or any dataset identifying individual executives beyond what is publicly disclosed. Get the reference number before collection, because retrospective approval is not accepted.

Which corporate governance journals require a data availability statement?

Most major publishers now require one on every research article, including Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis, Wiley and Emerald, which between them publish most of this page. The statement is required even when the answer is that the data cannot be shared.

In this field the honest answer is usually that the data come from a licensed commercial database and cannot be redistributed. Say that plainly, name the database, and state that the code and the list of identifiers are available on request. A restriction with a reason is accepted; silence is not.

Can I publish a corporate governance paper without collecting primary data?

Yes, and most published work in this field does exactly that. Archival studies of filings and databases, event studies around governance changes, cross-country institutional comparisons, systematic reviews with a stated protocol and bibliometric analyses all work without any primary collection.

What none of them can skip is a research question and an identification strategy. A regression on downloaded data with no design is rejected as quickly as a thin survey would be.

What is the CAS partition, and how is it different from the JCR quartile?

The CAS partition, run by the National Science Library of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, sorts journals into Zones 1 to 4 within a subject, with Zone 1 covering only the top five percent. The JCR quartile splits a comparable list into four equal quarters, so Q1 is the top twenty five percent.

That is why a JCR Q1 journal can sit in CAS Zone 2 or 3. CAS is the stricter cut, it is revised annually, and institutions usually mean a specific edition, so ask which one your rule names.

Which corporate governance journals are CAS Zone 1?

The CAS partition is published separately each year by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and is not part of the Scopus or Web of Science data behind this page, so no zone assignments are listed here rather than guessed. Check the current year's table through your university library, which is where almost every Chinese institution hosts it.

As a working expectation, the senior SSCI accounting titles at the top of Route 2 sit highest, and most of the rest of this page does not reach Zone 1. Confirm before relying on it, because zones move year to year.

How do Chinese institutions rank corporate governance journals?

Most use the CAS partition as the primary ladder, often alongside an internal list that names specific journals for promotion and bonus purposes, and some business schools add the ABDC or the Financial Times list on top. Scopus quartiles carry less weight in China than they do in South and Southeast Asia.

The practical consequence is that a Scopus Q1 title with no CAS zone can count for very little at a Chinese university while counting fully at a Malaysian or Indian one. Get the written rule before you choose the venue, not after the acceptance.

How much does it cost to publish a corporate governance paper in an indexed journal?

It can be nothing at all. Eight titles on this page charge no fee, and every journal in Route 2, including the senior SSCI names, charges no APC unless you choose the open access licence.

Where a fee applies, the range runs from about 13 US dollars to 1,800, and it tracks the publisher's location and business model rather than quality. The most expensive title here is ESCI Q1; several of the cheapest carry no quartile at all.

What editors screen before a reviewer sees your paper

The editorial office checks whether the English is clear enough to review, whether the structure and reference style match the journal, and what the similarity report says. Governance papers often carry a high overlap score innocently, because variable definitions and institutional background repeat across a thesis and its articles. Run your own check first with the Plagiarism & AI Similarity Checker, and settle the language and formatting through Manuscript Editing rather than after a rejection.

Before you shortlist, the AI Journal Finder matches your abstract against indexed journals in seconds.

Where Research Ramp comes in

We match a finished abstract against live indexing, tell you plainly when a design will not survive the first screen, and prepare the submission so the editorial office has no reason to bounce it on formatting. Subject-matched PhD editors, milestone payments, and the author stays the author throughout. The revision round is Review & Response Support, and past work is on our Case Studies page.

Questions we are asked about conference papers

Send us the abstract, we will send back the shortlist

Send us your abstract and we will return a shortlist that separates SCIE, SSCI, AHCI, Scopus and EI options, with the access model marked against each. Tap the WhatsApp icon, or scan the WeChat code. To hand over the whole route from venue choice to acceptance, that is the Full Publication Package.

WhatsApp WeChat

×

Connect with Research Ramp on WeChat

Scan the QR code to add us on WeChat.

Contact page

发送摘要，即可获得按检索类型分层的期刊清单。

Disclaimer. Every table on this page is correct as on October 2026 and no later. Article charges shown in US dollars are approximate conversions at October 2026 rates, and journals bill in their own currency. Indexing, quartile, access model and charges change through the year, and journals can be added to or removed from Scopus and Web of Science at any time. This page is general information only. Research Ramp Private Limited accepts no responsibility or liability for any decision made on the basis of it, including the choice of journal, any charge paid, or the outcome of any submission. Every detail must be independently verified by the author with the journal's own website and the live Scopus source list and Web of Science Master Journal List before submitting. If you would like an informal second check, send us the title and we will look at it for you.

本页所有列表数据截至 2026 年 10 月，仅供一般参考。Research Ramp 不对任何依据本页作出的选刊、付费或投稿结果承担责任。投稿前请务必通过期刊官网及 Scopus、Web of Science 实时数据自行核实收录情况与费用。