Editorial Policies

Focus and Scope

The International Journal of Regional Development publishes research on how regions grow, why their trajectories diverge, and how policy and planning reshape territorial outcomes. Its unit of analysis is the region: sub-national territories (metropolitan, urban, rural, peripheral and lagging areas), cross-border and supranational spaces, and the places that connect them through migration, trade, investment and infrastructure. Contributions are expected to use space to explain, not merely to locate, the phenomena they study.

Contributions are organised around five interconnected themes. Each is understood as a regional development process, not as a separate discipline:

  • Regional economic development and structural change. Regional growth and productivity, industrial and sectoral transformation, labour markets and skills, entrepreneurship, innovation and knowledge diffusion, regional finance and public investment, and the infrastructure that connects regions to national and global markets.
  • Spatial inequality and territorial cohesion. Disparities between and within regions, convergence and divergence, core–periphery and rural–urban relations, lagging and peripheral regions, spatial concentration, and the measurement of regional development outcomes.
  • Urban and regional systems, planning and land use. Urban growth and sprawl, housing and land markets, land-use change, transport and accessibility, service provision, and the theory and practice of regional and spatial planning.
  • Land, resources and environment in regional development. Natural resource use and governance, agriculture and food systems, climate adaptation, environmental degradation and conservation, and the transition to sustainable regional economies.
  • Regional policy, governance and institutions. Decentralisation and multi-level governance, place-based and cohesion policy, development agencies and special economic zones, cross-border and inter-regional cooperation, and the design and evaluation of regional policy instruments.

The journal welcomes place-based empirical work and theoretically grounded analysis. Contributions should specify the region or sub-national units studied and the data, period and methods used; quantitative, qualitative, mixed-method and comparative designs are equally welcome. Work without an explicit territorial dimension is outside the journal's scope.

 

Section Policies

Articles

Checked Open Submissions Checked Indexed Checked Peer Reviewed
 

Peer Review Process

The journal uses double-blind system for peer-review; both reviewers and authors' identities remain anonymous. The paper will be peer-reviewed by three experts; two reviewers from outside and one editor from the journal typically involve in reviewing a submission.

 

Publication Frequency

This journal uses continuous publication: individual items are published as soon as they are ready and added to the Table of Contents of the current volume, and a cumulative Table of Contents is compiled at the end of each year.

From 2015 to 2024 the journal appeared semi-annually, with issues released in June and December.

From 2025 it is published as one annual volume per year, completed in December.

 

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

 

Archiving

This journal utilizes the LOCKSS system to create a distributed archiving system among participating libraries and permits those libraries to create permanent archives of the journal for purposes of preservation and restoration. More...

 

Index/List/Archive

AcademicKeys

CNKI

EconBib

Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek（EZB）

Europub Database

InfoBase Index

JouralTOCs

Library and Archives Canada

LOCKSS

National Library of Australia

OAJI

RePec

Root Indexing

Scilit

WorldCat

Zeitschriftendatenbank (ZDB)

 

Special Issue Proposals

To foster academic collaboration and advance scholarly research, we welcome special issue proposals from scholars, researchers, and academic or research institutions. Those interested in organizing a special issue are invited to submit their inquiries and proposals to the journal’s editorial office via email: ijrd@macrothink.org