Peer-reviewed journals worth following in psychotherapy

Process, outcome and the therapeutic relationship

• Psychotherapy Research

  Taylor & Francis, for the Society for Psychotherapy Research

  The main venue for process research: what happens inside sessions, how alliance ruptures are repaired, what distinguishes therapists whose clients improve. Quantitative and methodologically demanding, but the discussion sections are usually readable on their own and are where the clinically usable material sits. Choose this one if you want evidence about how therapy works rather than whether it works.

• Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice

  Wiley, for the British Psychological Society

  Broader and more clinically oriented, mixing quantitative studies with qualitative and single-case work. The most consistently useful of the BPS journals for someone in private practice, partly because it publishes on the awkward middle ground — therapist factors, endings that go badly, what clients say they actually wanted — that larger trials tend to average away.

• Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy

  Wiley

  Applied clinical work across modalities, with a steady stream of papers on formulation, comorbidity and treatment adaptation. Useful when you are working with a presentation outside your core training and want something more grounded than a textbook chapter but less committing than a full systematic review.

• British Journal of Clinical Psychology

  Wiley, for the British Psychological Society

  Empirical clinical psychology with a UK service context, which makes its assumptions about referral routes and resource constraints recognisable in a way that much US-based research is not. Strongest on assessment, psychometrics and the evidence base behind common presentations; weaker if you want depth on the relationship itself.

Modality-specific and specialist

• Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapy

  Cambridge University Press, for the BABCP

  The CBT literature at its most practical: protocol development, single-case experimental designs and the 'clinical practice' papers that walk through how an intervention was actually delivered. Worth following even if you do not work cognitively, because it is where new brief interventions are described in enough procedural detail to be evaluated rather than merely believed.

• Transcultural Psychiatry

  SAGE Journals

  Culture, migration and the assumptions embedded in diagnostic categories. Directly relevant to anyone working with clients whose idiom of distress does not map onto the manuals, and the single most useful corrective to a training that treated a Western clinical population as the default. Particularly strong on refugee and asylum contexts.

• Journal of Psychosomatic Research

  Elsevier

  The body–mind interface: functional symptoms, health anxiety, chronic illness and the psychological dimensions of medical presentations. Read it when a client's difficulty arrives through their body and the medical system has already told them nothing is wrong; it is one of the few places where that clinical situation is taken seriously as a subject in its own right.

• Psychology & Health

  Taylor & Francis

  Health behaviour, adjustment to illness and the psychology of long-term conditions. Less clinically immediate than the others here, but the place to look for evidence on adherence, illness beliefs and coping when you work with medically unwell clients or alongside physical health services.

Reading without institutional access

Most of the titles above are paywalled. These two routes cover a surprising amount of the same literature legitimately.

• PubMed Central

  Free full text for a large share of publicly funded research, including a good deal of psychotherapy outcome work. The fastest first check before you consider paying for an article, and the only one of these routes that carries no licensing ambiguity.

• Directory of Open Access Journals

  A vetted index of fully open-access journals, which filters out the predatory titles that flood ordinary search results in this field. Useful for finding a legitimate open venue when the paywalled literature is out of reach, and for checking a journal you have been invited to publish in.