About Abstracts in Anthropology

Abstracts in Anthropology

Abstracts in Anthropology is a comprehensive abstracting journal for anthropology, published by SAGE Publishing. It is recorded in the Journals World catalogue with print ISSN 0001-3455 and online ISSN 1557-5136, with 0001-3455 as the linking ISSN. OpenAlex identifies the source as S4210170848, names SAGE Publishing as the host organisation, gives the United States as the country of publication, records a first publication year of 1970 and a most recent publication year of 2026 in its coverage, and points to the SAGE page for the title as its homepage. SAGE describes the title, in its own advertising and publishing material, as the only comprehensive abstracting journal in the field of anthropology, publishing about 3,000 abstracts per volume and providing thorough coverage of anthropological scholarship across its subfields. That description defines the title more accurately than any generic journal label: Abstracts in Anthropology is primarily a discovery and current-awareness instrument for a whole discipline, a structured map of what anthropology is publishing, rather than a conventional venue in which authors publish original research articles of their own.

That distinction governs everything else in this profile. Authors generally do not submit an original paper to Abstracts in Anthropology in the way they submit to a research journal; instead, the title's value lies in the scholarship it surveys, selects and abstracts. Librarians, researchers and students use it to scan a field that is unusually dispersed across books, edited volumes, journals in neighbouring disciplines and regional publications that no single researcher could monitor alone. A profile that treated it as an ordinary article journal, complete with invented submission promises and author fees, would mislead every one of those users. This profile therefore explains what the title is, how its coverage is organised, what its bibliometric record does and does not mean, and how to use it well, grounding each factual claim in the catalogue record, a direct OpenAlex fetch or SAGE's own description of the title.

Identity and bibliographic record

The core record is stable and easily checked. Title: Abstracts in Anthropology. Print ISSN: 0001-3455. Online ISSN: 1557-5136. Linking ISSN: 0001-3455. Publisher: SAGE Publishing, also styled SAGE Publications. Country of publication in the OpenAlex record: United States. SAGE journal code context: the publisher page recorded by OpenAlex is the SAGE site page for Abstracts in Anthropology, journal 202390 in SAGE's own numbering as shown in that page address. Wikidata identifier recorded by OpenAlex: Q58222993. Editor-in-Chief: Roger W. Moeller is the name listed for the title in SAGE's advertising and publishing solutions material consulted for this profile; editorial listings change over time, so readers who need the current editor for a formal purpose should confirm the name on SAGE's current page for the title rather than relying on any secondary listing, including this one.

SAGE's own summary of the title supplies the scale figures that matter most. It describes Abstracts in Anthropology as the only comprehensive abstracting journal in anthropology and states that it publishes 3,000 abstracts per volume, with thorough coverage of anthropological scholarship in all its subfields, naming cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, archaeology and linguistics. The same summary notes a shift in the discipline itself: anthropology's traditional focus on so-called Third World societies has moved toward subcultures within industrialised nations, and the abstracting coverage follows the scholarship as that focus changes. A figure of 2.1 appears as an impact factor in that SAGE advertising material. This profile reports that figure only as a publisher advertising listing, attributed exactly that way, because no Journal Citation Reports page was consulted to verify a current impact factor independently; readers who need a citable impact factor for an evaluation should obtain it from the primary Clarivate source for the relevant year.

A discipline that needs an abstracting journal

To understand why this title exists, a reader must understand anthropology's publication ecology. Anthropology studies human beings in full: culture and society, biology and evolution, the material past, and language. Its four classic subfields, cultural anthropology, physical or biological anthropology, archaeology and linguistic anthropology, publish in different places, use different evidence and often read different literatures. Cultural anthropologists publish ethnographic monographs and journal articles alongside sociologists and geographers. Archaeologists publish site reports, methods papers and regional syntheses alongside historians and earth scientists. Biological anthropologists publish in anatomy, primatology, genetics and human evolution venues. Linguistic anthropologists publish with linguists, communication scholars and area studies specialists. Important work also appears in edited volumes, museum publications, regional journals and languages other than English. No individual, however diligent, can scan that whole output unaided.

An abstracting journal answers that structural problem. By gathering thousands of abstracts into organised volumes, it lets a reader survey a period of scholarship quickly, identify the items that merit full reading, and notice connections across subfields that the original publication pattern hides. Before comprehensive digital databases, such services were the discipline's main discovery infrastructure, and titles founded around 1970, the first publication year in the OpenAlex record for this source, belong to the generation in which print abstracting services professionalised that infrastructure. Digital search has changed the mechanics, but it has not removed the problem: keyword search finds what a reader already knows to ask for, while a curated abstracting volume shows a reader what the field produced, including work in adjacent vocabulary that a search string would miss. That browsing and field-mapping function remains the strongest reason to consult Abstracts in Anthropology today.

Coverage across the subfields

SAGE's description names the coverage directly: cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, archaeology and linguistics, with thorough coverage of anthropological scholarship in all its subfields and about 3,000 abstracts per volume. Each area deserves a word of explanation for readers outside the discipline. Cultural anthropology coverage captures ethnographic work on kinship, ritual, economy, politics, religion, media and everyday life, including the discipline's turn toward communities inside industrialised societies, professional and urban subcultures, migration and transnational life. Physical anthropology coverage captures human evolution, primate studies, skeletal biology, adaptation and variation, the evidence base for claims about what human beings are biologically and how they became so. Archaeology coverage captures excavation, material culture, heritage and the reconstruction of past societies from their remains. Linguistics coverage, in the anthropological sense, captures language in social life: speech communities, language shift and loss, discourse, and the relation between language and identity, rather than formal linguistics alone.

OpenAlex topic data for the source, read carefully, is consistent with that breadth while also showing the limits of automated topic assignment for an abstracting title. Its leading assigned topics include anthropological studies and insights, archaeology and cultural heritage, ancient and medieval archaeology studies and cross-cultural and social analysis, each with counts in the low hundreds in the OpenAlex record consulted. Those counts should not be mistaken for the title's true contents: an abstracting journal's own bibliographic footprint in a database reflects how the database ingests the abstracts, not the thousands of underlying works surveyed. The topic spread is nonetheless useful as a fingerprint. It confirms that the record attached to these ISSNs behaves like a cross-subfield anthropology service, spanning social and cultural analysis through to deep-time archaeology, and not like a narrow speciality journal that happens to carry a broad title.

Metrics and what they mean for an abstracting title

A direct OpenAlex fetch by source identifier S4210170848, confirmed by ISSN, reported 1,825 works, 2,941 citations received, an h-index of 25, an i10-index of 95, a two-year mean citedness of 0.75, and only 4 open access works in the record, with coverage from 1970 to 2026. These numbers require the most careful reading of any in this profile. For a research journal, works and citations describe the journal's own articles and their reception. For an abstracting journal, the works in a database may be abstract entries, issues or ingested records whose relation to the underlying scholarship is indirect, and citations may accrue to the service as a finding aid as much as to original contributions. The figures are therefore reported here as OpenAlex database figures for the source, exactly as fetched, and not as a league table judgement. An h-index of 25 in that record shows the source is woven into the citation fabric of the discipline; it does not license a direct comparison with a primary research journal's h-index as if the two measured the same activity.

No CiteScore, SCImago quartile or independently verified impact factor is stated as fact in this profile. The 2.1 figure noted earlier is attributed solely to SAGE advertising material, where publishers present their titles in a marketing context. That attribution discipline matters for evaluators: a tenure file, a library cancellation review or a funder report should cite metrics from the metric provider, for a stated year, and should describe Abstracts in Anthropology by its function, a comprehensive abstracting service, before reaching for any number. Used functionally, the evaluation questions are different and better: does the service cover the subfields and publication types a department actually uses, does its organisation match how researchers browse, and does the institution's discovery stack already duplicate its coverage? Those questions, not a single score, decide the title's value to a given library.

Access, open access status and indexing

OpenAlex classifies the source as not an open access journal, and a direct search of the Directory of Open Access Journals for ISSN 0001-3455 returned no listing. Abstracts in Anthropology is therefore a subscription title: access normally runs through a library's SAGE holdings, in print historically and through SAGE's online routes for institutions that license it. Readers without institutional access should use library discovery services and interlibrary arrangements rather than expecting a public open archive of the full service. No article processing charge applies in the ordinary research-journal sense, because the title is not primarily a venue for author-submitted original articles, and no author fee schedule is stated here. Any SAGE page that appears to invite submissions for anthropology should be read carefully to check which SAGE anthropology title it actually belongs to; SAGE publishes many anthropology journals, and guidelines for a research title such as a theory or ethnography journal do not transfer to this abstracting title.

Discoverability of the underlying scholarship is the mirror image of access to the service itself. The abstracts point outward, to books, chapters and articles in the wider literature, and a complete workflow pairs a scan of Abstracts in Anthropology with follow-up through the reader's library catalogue and databases for the full texts identified. Researchers building a systematic or scoping review should record the title as a supplementary discovery source where they used it, with the volumes and years scanned, rather than presenting it as a primary database of record. That transparency lets later readers reproduce the search and understand which part of the evidence map came from curated abstracting and which part came from direct database searching.

Who should use it, and how to use it well

The natural users of Abstracts in Anthropology are anthropologists keeping breadth across a fragmenting field, postgraduate students orienting themselves before narrowing a thesis topic, lecturers assembling reading that spans subfields, and librarians supporting a discipline whose output refuses to sit inside one database. A doctoral student beginning work on, for example, migration and language can scan recent volumes to see how cultural anthropologists, linguistic anthropologists and archaeologists of the contemporary past are each framing movement and belonging, and can harvest terminology from the abstracts to build sharper database searches. A lecturer revising a course on human evolution can check what biological anthropology and archaeology have recently produced without pretending to have read every primary venue. A researcher returning to anthropology after time in a neighbouring field can use a run of volumes as a re-entry map.

Good use follows a few habits. Scan by subfield section rather than by keyword alone, because the curation is the value. Note items in adjacent subfields deliberately; the cross-boundary find is the service's distinctive gift. Follow every promising abstract to the full text before citing it, and cite the original work, not the abstract, in scholarly writing, except when the abstracting service itself is the object of study. Record volumes and years scanned when the scan informs a review or a funding application. And check the title's current SAGE page for present arrangements, because publisher pages, packaging and platform routes change, while the ISSN record and the title's abstracting function remain the stable facts on which this profile rests.

Strengths, limitations and verification checklist

The title's strengths are comprehensiveness within its discipline, longevity since 1970 in the database record, a clear four-subfield remit stated by its publisher and a scale, about 3,000 abstracts per volume in SAGE's description, that makes genuine field surveying possible. Its limitations are those of its form and model: it is a subscription service rather than an open resource, its abstracts are a guide to literature rather than a substitute for reading it, and its database metrics are easy to misread if treated as equivalent to a research journal's. None of that argues against the title. It argues for describing it accurately, which the thin generic language of older catalogue records failed to do and which this profile has aimed to correct.

Before acting on information about Abstracts in Anthropology, verify the essentials in order. Check the ISSNs, 0001-3455 in print and 1557-5136 online, against the record in front of you. Check that a SAGE page you land on belongs to this title and not to another SAGE anthropology journal. Check any metric with its provider for the year you need, and attribute the 2.1 figure, if you repeat it, to SAGE advertising material. Check current editor, packaging and access through SAGE or your library. And check coverage claims against SAGE's own description of the title. A service built to help a discipline keep track of itself deserves catalogue records that keep track of it with equal care.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Abstracts in Anthropology?

The print ISSN is 0001-3455 and the online ISSN is 1557-5136, as recorded in the catalogue and confirmed in the OpenAlex source record, which gives 0001-3455 as the linking ISSN.

Who publishes Abstracts in Anthropology?

SAGE Publishing publishes the title. OpenAlex names SAGE Publishing as host organisation and gives the United States as the country of publication.

Is it a journal where I submit my research article?

Primarily, no. It is a comprehensive abstracting journal that surveys and abstracts scholarship across anthropology's subfields. Authors seeking a venue for original research should choose a primary research journal; this title's role is discovery and coverage of work published elsewhere.

What does it cover and how much does it publish?

SAGE describes it as the only comprehensive abstracting journal in anthropology, publishing about 3,000 abstracts per volume across cultural anthropology, physical anthropology, archaeology and linguistics.

Is it open access or listed in DOAJ?

No listing was returned by a direct DOAJ search for its ISSN, and OpenAlex classifies the source as not an open access journal. Access is normally through library subscriptions to SAGE.

How the title fits alongside databases and research journals

It helps to place Abstracts in Anthropology on the map of tools an anthropologist actually uses. Research journals publish the primary record and carry the field's arguments. Databases provide searchable access across many publishers, with coverage and interfaces that vary by institution. Abstracts in Anthropology sits between those layers as a curated, discipline-shaped survey: narrower than a multidisciplinary database by design, broader than any single journal by function, and organised around the subfield structure that anthropologists themselves recognise. That position explains both its endurance and the loyalty of the libraries that keep it. A department that cancels it without checking overlap may discover that no remaining tool reproduces its exact browsing shape, while a department whose discovery stack already mirrors its coverage may judge the overlap acceptable. The decision is local, evidence-based and functional, which is why this profile has resisted reducing the title to a single score and has instead documented its remit, scale and model from the publisher's own description and the bibliographic record.

For individual readers the practical implication is simple. When starting a new topic, spend an hour with the survey before spending a week with searches. The abstracts will teach the topic's current vocabulary, its leading venues and its subfield fault lines, and every later search will be sharper for that hour. When finishing a project, scan the most recent coverage once more for the adjacent work that keyword habits tend to miss. Few tools repay that closing check as reliably as a comprehensive abstracting service built for exactly one discipline.