As academics and professionals who research and publish in the field of adoption, we are faced with numerous challenges when choosing who we research or write for. For example: do we choose advancement—and publish in scholarly journals or service to the end-user—and publish in more accessible locations like books and magazines? If we choose the former, what are the best journals to publish in?

With so many disciplines publishing in adoption (psychology, sociology, medicine, law, social work, woman’s studies, anthropology, etc.), there are now hundreds of journals that one can publish in—as well as seek out adoption-related studies. How easy is it to locate the best studies? Can we rely on the databases and search engines, or should we go directly to the journals?

In this paper, we present the results of our stock-take study of adoption literature: a comprehensive review of adoption-related scholarly publications from 2000 to 2012. We’ll present a summary of the publication trends, rankings of the primary authors to publish in the field, and a list of the top 100 journals that publish adoption research. We also discuss the results of search engine, database and keyword analyses, to enhance successful search strategies and minimise manual screening of results.