Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy

• 1. Introduction

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  The Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy has carried a different name for most of its life. It started in 1957 as the Journal of Developmental Reading, a modest title for a modest ambition: helping teachers find practical ideas rooted in research. What it would become is something its founders could not have predicted. How does a classroom-focused periodical survive decades of shifting educational theory, multiple name changes, and a transformation in who reads and how? The journal's path from 1957 to the present runs through two renamings, a new publisher, and an evolving understanding of what literacy itself means.

• 2. A Name in Three Parts

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  Volume 8 arrived in 1964 with a new title on its cover: Journal of Reading, assigned the ISSN 0022-4103. The original name, Journal of Developmental Reading, had served the publication for seven years. The 1964 shift reflected a broadening scope, pulling back from the developmental framing to claim the wider territory of reading itself. Then, in 1995, the journal changed names a second time, settling on Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy. That final title made the audience explicit in a way neither previous name had attempted, anchoring the journal's identity to the people in the chairs rather than the act on the page.

• 3. Who Runs It

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  Judith Franzak, Koomi Kim, and Heather Porter serve as the journal's current editors, all affiliated with Salisbury University, covering Volumes 65 through 68. Wiley-Blackwell publishes the journal six times per year. It is one of three journals the International Literacy Association puts out on its behalf. That institutional backing from a professional association dedicated to literacy research gives the journal a stable home and a built-in readership among practitioners and researchers working in the field.

• 4. What the Journal Publishes

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  The journal's stated focus is practical, classroom-tested ideas grounded in research and theory. That phrasing does real work: it signals that abstract findings matter only when they connect to something a teacher can actually try. The audience implied by that mission is working educators, not just researchers writing for other researchers. The dual commitment to practice and theory sets the editorial bar: a piece that is purely theoretical without classroom application, or purely anecdotal without grounding in research, sits outside what the journal is trying to do.

• 5. Standing in the Field

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  In 2011, the Journal Citation Reports gave the journal an impact factor of 0.728. That placed it 102nd out of 203 journals in the category "Education & Educational Research." Sitting near the midpoint of more than two hundred education journals is a particular kind of position: not a flagship publication, but a consistently cited one in a crowded field. The impact factor measures how often other researchers cite articles from a given journal, so a ranking in the middle of the field means the work published here does travel outward into the broader literature.