Animation (journal)

• 1. Introduction

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  Animation, the journal, occupies a specific and deliberate niche in academic publishing. Launched in 2006, it operates as a peer-reviewed forum focused on a question that sounds simple but runs surprisingly deep: what does animation mean for the rest of media? Not just what animation is, but what it does to film, to television, to the broader landscape of moving images.

  Suzanne Buchan, based at the Royal College of Art, serves as editor-in-chief. SAGE Publications, one of the major academic publishing houses, distributes the journal three times a year. That triannual rhythm sets a deliberate pace for a field that invites careful, sustained argument rather than rapid-fire commentary.

  The journal's coverage in major indexing services, from the Arts and Humanities Citation Index to Scopus, signals that scholars working in animation studies have a recognised place in the wider conversation about media and the humanities. The questions the journal was built to ask, about animation's implications across other forms of media, remain very much open.

• 2. Scope and Focus

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  Film and media studies form the disciplinary home of Animation, but the journal's stated focus pushes past cataloguing animated works. Its central concern is animation's implications for other forms of media, a framing that treats animation not as a genre to be described but as a lens that changes how we see everything else.

  That orientation shapes what the journal publishes. Peer review ensures that arguments are tested before they reach readers, and the triannual schedule means each issue carries work meant to endure rather than react to the moment. The Royal College of Art connection, through editor-in-chief Suzanne Buchan, places the journal at an intersection of practice and scholarship that is not universal among humanities publications.

  SAGE Publications brings the journal into broad institutional circulation. Libraries and research databases that subscribe to SAGE's catalogue gain access to Animation alongside thousands of other peer-reviewed titles, positioning animation studies within mainstream academic infrastructure rather than on its margins.

• 3. Indexing and Reach

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  Inclusion in the Arts and Humanities Citation Index carries particular weight for academic journals. That index is used to measure scholarly impact and to assess which journals matter in tenure and promotion decisions. Animation's presence there places animation studies on equal footing with established humanities disciplines.

  Scopus provides a second major citation-tracking footprint, extending the journal's visibility across a wider range of institutional databases. The British Humanities Index and Current Contents/Arts and Humanities add further coverage in humanities-specific cataloguing systems. Academics Premier and Educational Research Abstracts Online extend reach into education-facing databases, which reflects animation's relevance to media pedagogy as well as media theory.

  That collection of indexing services means a researcher working in film theory, education, or broad humanities scholarship is likely to encounter Animation when running a systematic search. The journal's founding in 2006 gave it roughly two decades to accumulate a citation record that those indexes now track and surface.