Acta Classica Universitatis Scientiarum Debreceniensis

About Acta Classica Universitatis Scientiarum Debreceniensis

Acta Classica Universitatis Scientiarum Debreceniensis — Journal Profile

Acta Classica Universitatis Scientiarum Debreceniensis (often shortened to Acta Classica Debreceniensis, or ACD) is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal in classical studies published from the University of Debrecen in Hungary. It is the journal of the Department of Classical Philology and Ancient History, and its official journal site is hosted by the University of Debrecen Library on the Debrecen electronic journals platform. The journal publishes research on the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, covering Greek, Roman and Byzantine literature and culture, ancient and late antique history, classical archaeology, linguistics, philosophy, religion and the classical tradition. It appears annually, it is published in open access form, and it charges no submission fee and no article processing charge, according to the information published on its official site at the time of checking.

For readers meeting the journal for the first time, the most important point is its identity. This is a Hungarian university classics journal with a long print history and a newer open online edition. It is not the similarly named South African journal Acta Classica, which is a different periodical with different ISSNs, and it is not a general humanities magazine. Its contributions are specialist research articles, written mainly by classicists, ancient historians, archaeologists and linguists, and addressed to readers who work on antiquity or on the later reception of Greek and Roman culture.

Quick Facts

History and Continuity

The journal belongs to the tradition of university Acta series, in which a faculty or department publishes an annual volume of research from its own scholars and from the wider international community. The official journal site states that the journal was founded in 1965 by Stephanus Borzsák, Professor of Classical Philology at the University of Debrecen, and the volume numbering supports that long continuity: the official site presented Volume 62 as the current issue in 2026, published on 1 September 2026. Published volumes are archived in DEA, the institutional repository of the University of Debrecen, according to the official site. A journal that reaches a sixty-first annual volume has survived several very different periods in Hungarian higher education, including the transition from print-only publishing to online open access publishing.

That transition matters for readers. Earlier volumes circulated mainly through university libraries and exchanges between classics departments. The present online edition, hosted by the University of Debrecen Library, makes individual articles freely readable, assigns article-level DOIs, and presents abstracts and full texts on a standard open journal platform. OpenAlex, checked for this profile, also describes the source as an open access journal and records an open access flip year of 2016, which is consistent with a title that moved from a primarily print existence to a free-to-read online edition in the middle of the last decade. Authors citing older work should therefore expect a mixed record: some earlier material is best traced through library catalogues, while recent volumes are directly readable on the journal site.

The Latin title itself is informative. Acta Classica Universitatis Scientiarum Debreceniensis can be understood as the classical proceedings of the University of Debrecen. The title has remained stable, which helps bibliographers, but it also creates a practical risk of confusion with other Acta Classica titles. The safeguard is always the ISSN pair: 0418-453X for print and 2732-3390 for the online edition. Any catalogue record, citation database entry or library holding that carries different ISSNs belongs to a different journal, however similar the short title may look.

Publisher and Institutional Home

The journal is published by the Department of Classical Philology and Ancient History of the University of Debrecen, in Hungary. Debrecen is one of Hungary's major university cities, and the department is the journal's scholarly home: the editorial leadership is drawn substantially from that department and from ancient history at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, with an international editorial board. The journal site is part of the University of Debrecen Library's electronic journals service, which provides the submission system, the archive, the DOI links and the journal's policy pages.

This institutional anchoring has practical consequences. The journal is not owned by a commercial publishing house, it does not operate on article charges, and its continuity depends on the department and the university library rather than on subscription income. Readers should use the official Debrecen site, rather than third-party aggregator pages, for current editorial names, current policy wording and the definitive table of contents of each volume.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The official journal site describes a broad classical scope. The journal publishes articles in classical philology, ancient history and classical archaeology, and it welcomes work in several connected areas. In the site's own summary, those areas include the study of Greek, Roman and Byzantine literature and culture, ancient and late antique history, linguistics, philosophy, religion, and the classical tradition, together with work described under the heading of digital classics. That breadth is typical of a departmental classics annual: the unifying principle is antiquity and its afterlife, not a single method.

Philology and literature

Text-based scholarship is central. Recent volumes include close readings of Virgil, studies of ancient commentary traditions, work on Latin poetry and its reception, and investigations of Greek and Roman prose. The 2025 volume, for example, opened with a study of Dido and Anna in Virgil's Aeneid and in later authors including Ovid and Silius Italicus, followed by a study of how ancient commentators handled an inconsistency between the two Palinurus episodes in the Aeneid. Such articles assume detailed knowledge of the primary texts, work in the original languages, and engage with international scholarship in several modern languages.

Ancient history, epigraphy and archaeology

Historical contributions address the political, social and religious history of the Greek and Roman worlds and of late antiquity. Inscriptions feature regularly, both as primary evidence in their own right and as evidence for language change. Recent work has used computerized dialectology on Latin inscriptions, examined magical iconography in Egypt and the Near East, and studied altars and cult in Roman Pannonia, the province in which Roman Hungary lay. Archaeological and material-culture topics sit naturally alongside textual ones, reflecting the combined philology and ancient history remit of the publishing department.

Language, religion, magic and reception

Linguistic studies of Greek and Latin, including the later development of Latin in the provinces, form a recurring strand. Religion and magic appear both as historical subjects and as lived practice, from amulets and healing to the iconography of protective deities. Reception studies trace how classical texts, myths and ideas were read, reused and transformed in later centuries. The classical tradition strand therefore extends the journal's chronological reach well beyond antiquity itself, while keeping the ancient material at the centre of the argument.

What an Issue Looks Like

An annual volume is a substantial collection of full-length research articles. The 2025 volume illustrates the pattern: articles are individually paginated, each carries its own abstract and DOI, and the subjects move across Latin literature, ancient scholarship, religious practice and historical linguistics within a single issue. There is no news, teaching-notes or book-trade content; the journal is a research venue. Readers browsing a volume should expect long, footnoted, bibliography-rich articles rather than short communications, and should expect frequent quotation of Greek and Latin, usually with translation or discussion where the argument requires it.

Editorial Leadership and Board

The official editorial team page, checked for this profile, lists two editors-in-chief: Tamás Gesztelyi, of the Department of Classical Philology and Ancient History at the University of Debrecen, and György Németh, of the Department of Ancient History at Eötvös Loránd University. The editorial board is international and includes, as listed on that page, Neil Adkin (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Lee Fratantuono (Maynooth University), Stefano Grazzini (University of Salerno), Stefano Magnani (University of Udine), Ioan Piso (Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca), Levente Takács (University of Debrecen) and Zsuzsanna Várhelyi (Boston University). István Kovács of the Debrecen department is listed in a supporting editorial and contact role. Board membership in university journals changes over time, so authors should confirm the current masthead on the official page before addressing correspondence.

The composition of the board matches the scope. Its members cover Latin literature, Greek and Roman history, epigraphy and the archaeology of the Roman provinces, which are the areas in which the journal most often publishes. A board drawn from Hungary, Romania, Italy, Ireland and North America also reflects the journal's multilingual author community.

Peer Review and Editorial Process

The journal states that all submitted papers undergo double-blind peer review, including plagiarism screening, based on the first opinion of the editors-in-chief and the assessment of at least two reviewers. In a double-blind process the author does not know the reviewers and the reviewers do not know the author, so manuscripts should be prepared without identifying information in the text itself. The journal also publishes pages on publication ethics and research integrity, and on its open access, copyright and licensing arrangements, which authors should read together with the author guidelines before submitting.

No verified median decision time for this journal could be confirmed from sources fetched for this profile, so any claim about how many weeks a decision typically takes would be speculation and is not published here. Authors who need a decision by a fixed date, for example for a funding report or a doctoral examination, should ask the editorial office directly before submitting, and should remember that an annual publication rhythm means that accepted articles normally wait for the next annual volume.

Open Access, Licensing and Charges

The official site states that the journal applies immediate open access, that authors retain copyright without restrictions, and that content is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 licence. Readers may therefore read and share articles freely for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, but may not distribute modified versions under that licence. The same official information states that there are no submission charges and no article processing charges. That combination — free to read and free to publish — is characteristic of university-funded diamond open access publishing, and it is one of the journal's clearest attractions for authors whose grants carry no publication budget.

Because licence wording can change, reusers who need more than reading access, for example a translator or a course-pack compiler, should check the licence statement attached to the specific article and volume they intend to reuse, rather than relying on a summary in a directory profile.

Metrics — What Can Be Verified

Metrics for a small humanities annual must be read with care, because citation counts in classical studies are low in absolute terms and accumulate slowly. The figures below come from the OpenAlex source record resolved through its ISSN endpoint and fetched for this profile, attributed to OpenAlex as at the time of checking. OpenAlex records can merge or split over time, so the same figures may differ slightly on a later fetch.

The older JournalsWorld record for this journal also carried an h-index of 4, which agrees with the OpenAlex figure fetched for this profile. Scopus-based summaries for the title have reported a very low CiteScore and SJR in the region of 0.1; those figures come from secondary summaries rather than from a direct SCImago fetch for this profile, and they are not republished here as precise current values. The honest summary is that this is a specialist journal whose influence is disciplinary and qualitative — it is read by the scholars who work on its texts and regions — rather than a high-volume citation venue. A Clarivate Journal Impact Factor for this title could not be verified from sources fetched for this profile and is therefore not stated.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal maintains an abstracting and indexing page on its official site, and authors should treat that page as the authoritative list. OpenAlex, in the record fetched for this profile, lists the source among the titles recorded in several scholarly registers, including ERIH PLUS, the European reference index for the humanities, together with national scholarly lists recorded by OpenAlex under the labels anvur-scientific, jufo-1 and vabb-shw. The journal's articles are discoverable through their DOIs, through the University of Debrecen Library platform, and through general scholarly search engines that harvest open access journal platforms.

A listing in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) for this title could not be verified from the DOAJ search results obtained for this profile, so no DOAJ claim is made here either way. Authors for whom a DOAJ listing, a Scopus listing or a Web of Science listing is a formal requirement should verify the current status directly in that database before submitting, because database rosters change and directory summaries can lag behind them.

How to Submit

Submissions are made through the journal's site on the Debrecen electronic journals platform. The official submission guidance, as published on the journal site, includes the following practical points. The submission must not have been previously published and must not be under consideration by another journal, unless an explanation is given to the editor. The submission file should be in OpenOffice, Microsoft Word or RTF format. Where URLs exist for references, they should be provided. The text should be single-spaced, in a 12-point font, using italics rather than underlining except for URLs, with illustrations, figures and tables placed in the text at the appropriate points rather than gathered at the end. The text must follow the stylistic and bibliographic requirements of the journal's author guidelines.

1. Read the journal's aims, author guidelines and ethics policy on the official Debrecen site.
2. Prepare the manuscript in Word, OpenOffice or RTF format, single-spaced, anonymised for double-blind review.
3. Check that Greek and Latin quotations, translations and bibliography are complete and in the journal's house style.
4. Register or log in on the journal platform and submit the manuscript with its abstract and metadata.
5. Complete the submission preparation checklist on the platform, confirming originality and format compliance.
6. Respond to the editors' and reviewers' reports, and expect publication in an annual volume rather than in a rapid online-first stream.

Article processing charges and submission charges are stated by the journal to be absent, so an author should treat any request for payment received in this journal's name as a warning sign and verify it with the editorial office through the official site before paying anything.

Who Should Publish Here — and Who Should Read It

The journal suits scholars of Greek and Latin language and literature, ancient and late antique historians, classical archaeologists, epigraphers, historians of ancient religion and philosophy, and researchers on the classical tradition who want a European, multilingual, open access venue with no author charges. It is a particularly natural home for work connected with Central and Eastern European collections, inscriptions and scholarly traditions, which feature in its pages alongside work on canonical authors. Doctoral and early-career researchers will find an established annual with an international board; senior scholars will recognise it as a long-running departmental series. Readers outside the submitting community — librarians building classics collections, students beginning a topic, and researchers in neighbouring fields such as Byzantine studies or historical linguistics — can use its open archive freely for reading and teaching preparation within the licence terms.

Similar Journals

Readers comparing venues in classical studies may also consider Acta Classica (the Classical Association of South Africa journal; a different title with ISSNs 0065-1141 and 2227-538X), Eirene: Studia Graeca et Latina, Philologia Classica, Emerita, Exemplaria Classica and Humanitas (Portugal). Each differs in language policy, charges, review practice and regional emphasis, so the comparison should be made on scope and audience rather than on a single metric.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Acta Classica Universitatis Scientiarum Debreceniensis open access?

Yes. The official journal site states that it applies immediate open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence, with authors retaining copyright.

Does the journal charge authors?

No. The official site states that there are no submission charges and no article processing charges.

What are the journal's ISSNs?

Print ISSN 0418-453X and online ISSN 2732-3390. Use these numbers to distinguish the Debrecen journal from other titles with similar names.

In which languages can I submit?

The official site states that articles are published in English, German, French, Italian and Spanish.

How is peer review organised?

The journal describes double-blind review with plagiarism screening and at least two reviewers for each submitted paper.

How often does the journal appear?

Annually. Volume 62 was the current issue on the official site in 2026, published on 1 September 2026.

Is this the same journal as Acta Classica from South Africa?

No. That is a separate journal, published for the Classical Association of South Africa, with its own ISSNs. The shared words in the titles reflect a common Latin naming tradition for classics periodicals, not a shared identity.

Profile Notes

This profile is based on the journal's official site and editorial team page, its submission guidance as indexed from that site, the OpenAlex source record resolved from its print ISSN, and library and secondary summaries used only where they are identified as such. Figures attributed to OpenAlex are given as at the time of checking. Any field that could not be verified from a fetched source — including a current Journal Impact Factor and a confirmed DOAJ listing — is recorded in this profile as could not be verified, rather than guessed.