Ethics Journals: Rankings, Open Access, and More

Ethics is one of the largest sub-disciplines of philosophy. It is a branch of philosophy that deals with moral principles and values. Traditionally, core focus areas include work on ethical theory, applied ethics, moral philosophy, and moral psychology. There is often a close overlap between purely ethical considerations with political, social, and legal philosophy. Likewise, some journals focus on topics within ethics such as bioethics, business ethics, and environmental ethics.​

This post lists the academic peer-reviewed journals that publish in Ethics. All of these can be viewed in the PJIP Directory alongside information about their word limits, open-access status, peer-review anonymity, if they publish book reviews, if they publish discussions, rankings including SJR, SNIP, and CiteScore, and for some, operational stats such as acceptance rates, number of submissions, and response times.

• View Ethics Journals in the PJIP Directory​

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Best Ethics Journals

Numerous metrics can be used to determine what the top Ethics journals are. This includes SJR, SNIP, CiteScore, Citation percentage, H-indexes, and Google Scholar rankings. All of these are readily accessible in the PJIP Ranking Index; users can easily compare these metrics to evaluate how each Ethics journal performs across various criteria.

• View Ethics Journal Rankings

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​Open Access Ethics Journals

A key distinction between academic journals is their open access status. The PJIP directory classifies ‘Diamond Open Access’ journals that charge no fees to authors or readers, ‘Part Open Access’ journals that require authors to pay a fee for open access publication, ‘Hybrid’ journals that offer authors the option to publish open access by paying fees (but will otherwise publish articles non-open access), and ‘Traditional’ journals that charge readers for access to their articles. The PJIP directory can be filtered to show Ethics journals in each of these categories.

• View diamond open access Ethics journals in the PJIP Directory

To assess the best open access Ethics journals, the PJIP Ranking Index can also be filtered by the journal’s open access status.

• View diamond open access Ethics journal rankings 

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List of Ethics Journals (In Alphabetical Order)

Analyse & Kritik Economics & Philosophy Erasmus Journal for Philosophy and Economics Ethical Theory & Moral Practice Ethics European Journal of Political Theory Journal of Applied Philosophy The Journal of Ethics Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy Journal of Moral Philosophy Journal of Political Philosophy Journal of Social Philosophy Moral Philosophy and Politics Oxford Studies in Metaethics (IOJ) Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics (IOJ) Oxford Studies in Political Philosophy (IOJ) Philosophy & Public Affairs Political Philosophy Political Theory Politics, Philosophy & Economics Public Affairs Quarterly Res Publica Social Philosophy & Policy (IOJ) Social Theory & Practice Utilitas

IOJ = Invite Only Journal

More information about how to be included in the PJIP can be found on our indexing page.

Last Updated: 12/08/24