Atalanta

About Atalanta

Atalanta — Journal Profile

Atalanta, in full Atalanta. Revista de las Letras Barrocas (Atalanta: Journal of Baroque Letters), is a Spanish peer-reviewed journal devoted to the literature of the Spanish Golden Age and, more broadly, to the culture of the Baroque period. It is edited by the Departamento de Literatura Española e Hispanoamericana (Department of Spanish and Hispano-American Literature) at the Universidad de Sevilla and published through Editorial Universidad de Sevilla, the University of Seville's publishing house. Its registered ISSN is 2340-1176. Founded in 2012 by Julián González-Barrera, the journal appears in semiannual volumes — two issues a year — and has built a specialist readership among Hispanists working on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain and its empire. This profile explains what Atalanta publishes, how its editorial process works, what its indexing and citation record actually show, what it costs to publish there, and how an author should judge whether a manuscript belongs in this journal rather than in a general Hispanic-studies venue.

The short version is that Atalanta is a deliberately narrow journal. It is not a general outlet for Spanish literature of all periods, and it is not a journal of modern Hispanic studies. Its centre of gravity is the Baroque: Golden Age literature first, with early modern history and art history admitted when the connection with the Baroque period is evident. Authors whose work sits squarely in that territory — an edition or study of a Golden Age text, theatre history, court culture, poetry, prose fiction, or the visual culture of the period — will find an editorial board and a readership formed for exactly that conversation. Authors working on the nineteenth, twentieth or twenty-first centuries should look elsewhere, however strong the manuscript.

Quick Facts

History and Identity

Atalanta was founded in 2012, at a moment when Spanish Golden Age studies already had established journals but few venues dedicated exclusively to Baroque letters as a cross-disciplinary field. The founding editor, Julián González-Barrera, framed the journal around a simple conviction, stated in its presentation: only by knowing the past can we understand the present and imagine the future. That sentence is more than a motto. It explains why the journal admits history and art history alongside literary study — the Baroque is treated as a period culture, not only as a shelf of texts.

The journal is housed in Seville, at the department's address on Calle Palos de la Frontera, in a city whose archives, cathedral, and university were themselves central to the world the journal studies: Seville was the great Atlantic port of the Spanish monarchy, the gateway for American silver and for books, people and images moving between Europe and the Americas. Recent issues illustrate the range that results. A 2023 issue, volume 11, number 2, took commercial theatre and the materiality of the Spanish stage in the Renaissance and Baroque as its theme, with studies including identity games and theatrical plot in the comedies of Lope de Rueda. The university repository, idUS, preserves the journal's issues and articles, and recent repository records extend into work on Seville festivals of 1671 and an Inquisition process in sixteenth-century Chile — evidence of a journal whose Baroque stretches from Andalusia to Spanish America.

A further identity marker arrived when the Faculty of Philology at Seville announced that Atalanta had been indexed in Web of Science. For a small, Spanish-language, university-published humanities journal, entry into that database is a significant external validation, because humanities coverage there is selective and because much Golden Age scholarship circulates in Spanish-language venues that international databases historically under-represent.

Scope: What Atalanta Publishes

The publisher's presentation defines the scope precisely. Each semiannual volume welcomes research on literature of the Golden Age (Literatura del Siglo de Oro), early modern history (Historia Moderna) and history of art (Historia del Arte), provided — for the history and art-history contributions — that there is a clear link with the Baroque period. In practice, that covers poetry, theatre, prose, and the literature of the Spanish sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; the culture of the court and the city; book history and reading; festivals, ceremony and spectacle; religious and political writing of the period; and the colonial Baroque in Spanish America, as the Chilean Inquisition study in the repository shows.

Equally important is what falls outside the scope. Work on medieval literature without a Baroque connection, on Enlightenment or later Spanish literature, on contemporary Hispanic culture, or on linguistics without a period anchor does not fit, however accomplished it may be. The secondary SCImago-derived listings classify Atalanta in History, Literature and Literary Theory, and Linguistics and Language — categories that describe where its citations are counted, not a licence to submit general linguistics. The operative test remains the one the journal itself states: Golden Age literature, or early modern history and art with an evident Baroque link.

Language policy reinforces the journal's identity. Spanish is the language of the journal. Articles in English, Italian and French are accepted only occasionally and only with the previous approval of the editorial board. Authors planning an English-language submission should therefore contact the board before preparing the manuscript, rather than assuming the exception will be granted after the fact. This policy is a feature, not a defect: Atalanta serves a scholarly community that reads Spanish as a matter of course, and publishing there places work directly in front of that community.

Editorial Process and Peer Review

Secondary descriptions of the journal, drawing on its own statements, describe a confidential evaluation system: submissions must be original and unpublished, and the editorial board decides on publication on the basis of confidential reports from external reviewers under a double-blind system, in which author and reviewer identities are withheld from each other. The Editorial Universidad de Sevilla page adds an integrity layer that applies across its journals: published work is expected to be unpublished and original, checked with the professional anti-plagiarism service Turnitin, and the journal reserves the right to reject articles whose similarity percentage is inadequate. Authors guarantee the authorship and originality of their article and take full responsibility for its content.

For authors, several practical consequences follow. First, anonymise the manuscript properly: remove self-identifying references, acknowledgements that name the author, and file metadata that reveals identity, because the review model depends on it. Second, do not submit work under consideration elsewhere; the originality requirement is explicit. Third, expect a specialist readership in review: a journal edited from a Golden Age department will send a Lope, Cervantes, Góngora or Quevedo manuscript to reviewers who know the editions, the criticism, and the archival record in detail, so bibliographic currency matters — engage the recent Spanish-language scholarship, not only the Anglophone classics of the field.

Turnaround times and acceptance rates are not published by the journal in the sources consulted for this profile, so any figure quoted by third-party listing sites for those items should be treated as unverified. Authors who need a decision by a fixed date — for a hiring, tenure or funding deadline — should ask the editorial office directly before submitting.

Indexing, Rankings and Citation Record

Indexing claims should always be separated by source, and Atalanta's case shows why. The publisher itself states two Spanish quality marks: the FECYT quality seal (sello de calidad FECYT), awarded within Spain's national journal-evaluation system, and a CIRC classification of B in both Social Sciences and Humanities. The University of Seville's Faculty of Philology separately announced the journal's entry into Web of Science. Those are the claims grounded in institutional sources.

The citation record is modest, as expected for a young, narrow, Spanish-language humanities journal, and the numbers differ by database and by year — a normal pattern that authors should read carefully rather than averaging into a single figure. OpenAlex, resolved in the foreground for this profile through its ISSN endpoint to the source record for ATALANTA Revista de las letras Barrocas (ISSN 2340-1176, host organisation University of Seville, country Spain), records 286 works and 60 citations, with an OpenAlex h-index of 3. This directory's older stored record gave an h-index of 5 and a publication coverage of 2016–2025. SCImago-derived secondary listings have reported an SJR of 0.140, an h-index of 3, and a best quartile of Q2, with subject positions in History and in Literature and Literary Theory at Q2 and Linguistics and Language at Q3 in the year those listings describe; a separate aggregator summary reported a CiteScore of 0.2 and an SNIP of 1.1, attributed as aggregator figures rather than publisher figures. None of these numbers is large, and none should be inflated: citation density in Golden Age literary studies is low across the whole field, publication is largely in Spanish, and books and editions — the field's prestige formats — are poorly captured by article-citation databases.

The correct reading is therefore qualitative. Atalanta is a recognised specialist journal with national quality certification in Spain, Web of Science indexing announced by its university, Scopus-derived visibility through SCImago, and a small but real citation footprint. Its Q2 category in this directory reflects that standing in its best subject category in the underlying ranking year; a quartile is always category- and year-specific, so authors citing the quartile to an institution should name the category and check the current SCImago record rather than treating Q2 as a permanent property of the journal.

Open Access, Licensing and Preservation

Editorial Universidad de Sevilla publishes all of its journals in open access. For Atalanta, the electronic edition is distributed, unless otherwise indicated, under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. In plain terms, readers may share and adapt the work for non-commercial purposes, with attribution, and adaptations must carry the same licence. Authors should note the non-commercial element: it is more restrictive than the CC BY licence that many science funders require, so an author bound by a funder open-access mandate with a specific licence requirement should confirm compliance with the editorial office before submission.

Preservation arrangements are unusually well documented for a journal of this size. The publisher states that its journals are hosted on its editorial domains with daily automatic backups by the university's computing service; that articles are deposited in the institutional repository idUS, whose preservation policy covers integrity checking, format migration and regular backups of content and metadata; and that the journals are supported by the Public Knowledge Project infrastructure, including the PKP Preservation Network, which uses the LOCKSS approach to decentralised, distributed preservation. For authors, that combination — publisher platform, institutional repository, and a preservation network — materially reduces the risk that a published article simply disappears, a risk that is real for small university journals hosted on a single departmental page.

On charges, the journal's DOAJ record — a foreground-verified listing for ISSN 2340-1176, under the title Atalanta: Revista de las Letras Barrocas and publisher Universidad de Sevilla — states that the journal has no article processing charge (the DOAJ APC field reads has_apc: false). That record, added to DOAJ in 2015 and last updated in September 2026 in the copy fetched for this profile, also records open access since 2013, Spanish as the journal language, double anonymous peer review, plagiarism detection in place, and authors retaining copyright. Authors should still confirm the current fee position with the editorial office if a charge would be a barrier, since directory records can age, but the DOAJ statement is a concrete, checkable source rather than an assumption from the journal's university-published type.

Who Should Submit — and Who Should Not

Atalanta is a strong fit for: a study of a Golden Age author, text, genre or debate that advances an argument rather than surveying the topic; an article on early modern Spanish history or art history where the Baroque connection is explicit and argued, not merely chronological; theatre-history work, including the material conditions of performance, of the kind gathered in the commercial-theatre issue; colonial Baroque studies that connect peninsular and American materials; and work that intervenes in Spanish-language scholarly debates, where the journal's readership is exactly the audience that will cite it.

It is a poor fit for: manuscripts in English submitted without prior board approval; work on later periods offered on the strength of a passing Baroque reference; general surveys aimed at students; and manuscripts whose bibliography ignores recent Spanish scholarship. It is also a poor fit for an author whose institution counts only Journal Impact Factor quartiles from a specific ranking year and category without checking them — the journal's strength is specialist standing and indexing, not a high citation metric, and the honest metrics above should be weighed before, not after, submission.

Preparing a Submission

Read at least one recent issue in full before writing. The idUS repository and the journal site make that easy, and it is the fastest way to calibrate length, citation style, the balance between archival evidence and argument, and the level of assumed reader knowledge. Frame the Baroque connection in the first pages: editors and reviewers applying an explicit scope test should not have to infer it. If the article is in a language other than Spanish, obtain the board's approval first, as the journal's own rules require. Prepare an anonymised copy for double-blind review, check the text for accidental self-identification, and be ready for the similarity screening the publisher describes. Finally, think about discoverability after publication: a clear title naming the author, text or problem studied, and an abstract that states the argument in terms a Hispanist searching the repository will use, will do more for the article's readership than any metric.

Verification Checklist for Readers

Because small journals are frequent targets of imitation and because aggregator listings go stale, verify before submitting or paying anything: confirm the ISSN 2340-1176 on the Editorial Universidad de Sevilla page for Atalanta; confirm the department and the Seville address match the Universidad de Sevilla; check the current issue and call information on the journal's own site rather than a listing site; verify indexing claims in the database itself — Web of Science and Scopus source lists — rather than in a screenshot supplied by a third party; and treat any unsolicited invitation using this journal's name but a different domain, or any request for a fee sent from a free email account, as a warning sign until the editorial office confirms it. The journal's DOAJ record can be checked directly by ISSN 2340-1176: it lists the journal under its full title, with Universidad de Sevilla as publisher, open access since 2013 and no article processing charge — if a supposed Atalanta record elsewhere shows a different publisher, a fee, or a different ISSN, treat it as suspect until the editorial office confirms it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Atalanta peer reviewed? Yes. Its system is described as double-blind evaluation by external reviewers, with the editorial board deciding, and the publisher applies originality and similarity checks.

What does Atalanta publish? Research on Golden Age literature, and on early modern history and art history with a clear Baroque connection.

Can I publish in English? Occasionally, and only with the editorial board's prior approval. Spanish is the journal's language; English, Italian and French are exceptions, not parallel tracks.

Is Atalanta open access? Yes, through Editorial Universidad de Sevilla, under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 unless otherwise indicated.

How strong are its metrics? Modest and honestly reported above: OpenAlex records 286 works, 60 citations and an h-index of 3 for the ISSN record; older stored and aggregator figures differ (stored h-index 5; SCImago-derived SJR 0.140 and best quartile Q2). Judge the journal on scope fit, certification and indexing rather than on citation volume.

When was Atalanta founded, and by whom? In 2012, by Julián González-Barrera, at the Universidad de Sevilla.

Sources

Editorial Universidad de Sevilla, journal page for Atalanta. Revista de las Letras Barrocas (ISSN, department, address, founding and scope statement, FECYT seal and CIRC B classification, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence, preservation and Turnitin statements). Universidad de Sevilla, Facultad de Filología news item on Atalanta's Web of Science indexing. Universidad de Sevilla idUS repository records for Atalanta issues and articles. OpenAlex source record resolved by ISSN 2340-1176 (works, citations, h-index, host organisation, country) — fetched directly for this profile. SCImago-derived secondary listings via ResearchBite and SciJournal, and an aggregator summary via Researcher.Life (SJR, quartiles, CiteScore and SNIP), attributed as secondary and aggregator figures. DOAJ record for ISSN 2340-1176 (title Atalanta: Revista de las Letras Barrocas; publisher Universidad de Sevilla, ES; added 2015-03-30; OA start 2013; has_apc false; double anonymous peer review; language ES) — fetched directly from the DOAJ API for this profile and re-verified in the foreground after an interim conflicting readout (see the correction note in the worker report).