British and American Studies

About British and American Studies

British and American Studies (B.A.S.): a full profile

British and American Studies, shortened on its own covers to B.A.S., is an annual, peer-reviewed, open-access journal of English studies published in Timișoara, Romania. It carries two ISSNs, both verified for this profile in the Directory of Open Access Journals and in OpenAlex: the print ISSN 1224-3086 and the electronic ISSN 2457-7715. It is a journal of the Romanian Society of English and American Studies, published by Editura Universității de Vest — the publishing house of the West University of Timișoara — and rooted in that university's Department of English Language and Literature and in the long-running Timișoara conference on British and American Studies, whose name the journal shares.

The shared name needs one clarification at the outset, because two different Romanian ventures use it. The Timișoara journal profiled here — ISSN 1224-3086, edited for many years by Professor Hortensia Pârlog and her colleagues — is distinct from the annually published conference volume of the same English title associated with Transilvania University of Brașov, whose first issue appeared in 2003. Similar titles in English studies are common, and the ISSN pair is the reliable way to tell them apart: if the record does not carry 1224-3086 or 2457-7715, it is not this journal, whatever its title page says. Authors citing B.A.S. should therefore give the ISSN or the Timișoara provenance alongside the title at least once in any report or bibliography where confusion is possible.

At a glance

History and the Timișoara conference connection

B.A.S. grew out of one of Romania's most durable English-studies gatherings. The Conference on British and American Studies at the West University of Timișoara was in its twenty-second edition in 2012, its twenty-third in 2013, and reached its thirty-fourth edition, on reconfiguring borders and boundaries through literature, language and culture, in May 2026. The journal's own volumes track a parallel maturity: Volume XIX appeared in 2013, Volume XXII in 2016, Volume XXV in 2019, Volume XXVIII in 2022, Volume XXX in 2024 and Volume XXXI in 2025. A journal that has reached its thirty-first annual volume in 2025 has a founding horizon in the mid-1990s, in the first years after Romanian universities rebuilt their international connections, and its continuity through three decades of Romanian higher-education change is itself a credential that should be stated, with the volume evidence, rather than as a vague claim of longevity.

Journal and conference reinforce each other without being the same thing. The conference, organised by the English Department of the Faculty of Letters, History, Philosophy and Theology at the West University of Timișoara together with the Romanian Society for English and American Studies (RSEAS) and the European Society for the Study of English (ESSE), gathers the community each May; the journal is the year's considered, peer-reviewed record of work in the same fields, open to contributors from Romania and abroad whether or not they attended. Conference themes — language studies, translation studies, semiotics, British and Commonwealth literature, American literature, cultural studies, gender studies and English language teaching in the classic conference programme — map closely onto the journal's subject range, and a prospective author can read recent conference themes as a fair guide to the conversations the journal's readers are currently having, while remembering that the journal's deadline and review process are its own.

Publisher, society and a note on the record

The Directory of Open Access Journals record for this journal, retrieved for this profile, names the publisher as Editura Universității de Vest in Romania and the institution as the Romanian Society of English and American Studies. The journal's own volumes describe it as a journal of that society, sponsored by the West University of Timișoara, with publishing responsibility in the university's Department of English Language and Literature and its university press. Those statements fit together: a society journal, housed in a university department, produced by the university's publishing house.

Two other attributions in circulation should not be copied. The older thin Journals World record rendered the publisher as a bare number followed by the country, losing the name entirely; and OpenAlex's host-organisation field for this source gives an unrelated-seeming name drawn from its own organisation matching. Neither survives contact with the journal's DOAJ record and its own title pages, which agree with each other. This profile therefore records Editura Universității de Vest as publisher, with the Romanian Society of English and American Studies as the owning society and the West University of Timișoara as the sponsoring institution, and flags the aggregator fields as a corrections-pass item for any downstream user of those databases.

Scope: British and American studies in full

The DOAJ record classifies the journal under English literature and American literature in the Library of Congress scheme and gives its keywords as literature, cultural studies, British literature, American literature, English language and translation studies. The journal's own published contents bear that classification out and widen it in practice. A B.A.S. issue can contain literary criticism on British and American authors of all periods; cultural-studies work on film, media and popular culture in the English-speaking world; linguistic studies of English, from phonetics and semantics to discourse analysis; translation studies, a field in which the Timișoara department has a particular tradition; semiotics; gender studies; and work on the teaching of English. The unifying condition is the object of study — the languages, literatures and cultures of Britain, America and the wider English-speaking world — not a single method.

That scope rewards papers that know which conversation they are joining. A literary paper should place its text in the critical debate about that author, period or form, and should expect readers who know the primary material well. A linguistics paper should be about English — its structure, use, variation or acquisition — in a way that speaks to scholars of English studies rather than to general linguists alone. A translation-studies paper can draw on the journal's strength in that area, including the department's long interest in how texts move between English and Romanian and other languages. A cultural-studies paper should keep its British, American or anglophone material central rather than decorative. In each case the test an author should apply before submitting is simple: would a scholar of British or American studies, reading only the title, abstract and first two pages, recognise this as a contribution to their field? If the honest answer is no, the paper belongs elsewhere, however good it is.

The Romanian setting is a feature of the scope, not a limitation on it. B.A.S. is one of the places where Central and Eastern European scholarship on the anglophone world is published in English, for an international readership, alongside contributions from Britain, America and the rest of Europe. Work that reflects on how British and American texts, language and culture are received, taught and translated outside the anglophone centre — imagology, reception studies, the history of English studies in Europe — has a natural home here, as the journal's own contents show, because the journal embodies that outside-looking-in perspective institutionally.

Editorial leadership

The journal's published volumes name Professor Hortensia Pârlog of the West University of Timișoara as editor — described in her department's own biographical material as the journal's editor-in-chief, a role she has held across the journal's long run, alongside editing The European English Messenger for the European Society for English Studies. Executive editors on recent volumes include Professor Mircea Mihăieş, Loredana Pungă and Dana Percec, with Pia Brînzeu serving as an executive editor in earlier volumes and Dana Crăciun appearing as a guest editor. The advisory board is international and senior: Ştefan Avădanei and Codrin Liviu Cuţitaru of Iaşi, Andrei Avram and Alexandra Cornilescu of Bucharest, Marcel Cornis-Pope of Virginia Commonwealth University, Rodica Dimitriu of Iaşi, Luminiţa Frenţiu of Timișoara, Fernando Galván of the University of Alcalá, Marta Gibinska of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Vesna Goldsworthy of the Universities of Exeter and East Anglia, Maurizio Gotti of Bergamo, J. Lachlan Mackenzie, Christian Mair of Freiburg, Ştefan Oltean of Cluj-Napoca, István D. Rácz of Debrecen and Stephen Tapscott of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among others named across volumes.

Board lists change slowly, and the exact composition should be taken from the most recent volume for any formal purpose. What the list establishes, across all the volumes consulted, is the journal's embedding: a Romanian editorial core, a national network across the major Romanian universities, and an advisory circle that reaches into the British, American, Spanish, Polish, Italian, German and Hungarian English-studies communities — the same network that sustains the Timișoara conference and ESSE. A submission is therefore read within a genuine European English-studies conversation, not within a single department.

Peer review, editorial policy and how to submit

The journal's editorial policy, published by the university, states that B.A.S. publishes original articles and book reviews that have not been published elsewhere, that contributions are written in English, and that articles and book reviews must be carefully formatted according to the detailed instructions to authors, with unformatted submissions not considered for peer review and publication. Prior to publication, all submitted articles and book reviews are peer reviewed according to criteria in a peer review form; the editors aim for a fair, unbiased and timely process; author anonymity is preserved during review; authors are informed of the outcome and may be asked to make changes, with content changes made by the authors only; and the editors reserve the right to edit for spelling, grammar and formatting. The policy states a deadline of 1 October each year for consideration for publication in the next year's issue — the governing rhythm for any prospective author.

The policy is equally explicit on integrity. Plagiarism and offensive language and images are not tolerated, and their presence leads to automatic rejection; if plagiarism is shown after publication, the article remains on the journal website clearly marked as fraud. The editors work in line with the COPE international standards for editors, encourage response and reaction from other researchers, and, where a genuine error that does not fully invalidate an article is pointed out, publish a corrected electronic version. The DOAJ record adds that plagiarism detection is in place, that the review process link and board information are published on the journal's own site at bas-journal.ro, that articles carry DOIs, and that the DOAJ-recorded publication time is 30 weeks — a realistic figure for an annual journal working to a fixed yearly deadline, and one authors should plan around rather than treat as a promise for an individual paper.

Practical submission facts from the journal's volumes: the language of the journal is English; contributions from Romania and abroad are welcome; and the journal's contact address in its volumes is the Department of English Language and Literature, 4 Bulevardul Vasile Pârvan, 300223 Timișoara, with the journal email given in those volumes. Authors should confirm the current submission route on the journal's current site before sending anything, because addresses and systems change, and should observe the 1 October deadline strictly — for an annual journal, missing it can mean waiting a full year.

Open access, licensing and charges — verified from DOAJ

British and American Studies is an open-access journal. Its DOAJ record, retrieved in full for this profile, states that open access began in 2015, that the licence is CC BY-NC-ND — Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial, No Derivatives, in the 4.0 form linked from the record — that the journal has no article processing charge and no other charges, and that authors do not retain copyright in the DOAJ record's terms, with a transfer of copyright agreement published by the journal. Those five facts together describe a diamond open-access model in the practical sense that matters to authors: readers pay nothing, authors pay nothing, the university and society carry the cost, and reuse of published articles is governed by a non-commercial, no-derivatives licence that permits sharing with attribution but not commercial reuse or adapted versions. Authors whose funders require a more permissive licence, or who need to retain copyright, should raise that with the editors before submitting, because the recorded terms will not suit every funding condition.

Indexing

The journal's volumes state that B.A.S. is indexed in CEEOL (Central and Eastern European Online Library), MLA, ERIH PLUS — shown as Erich Plus in one volume's typography — and Ulrich's (ProQuest). Its presence in DOAJ is verified directly by the record described above, and its Scopus-source presence is reflected in SCImago-derived listings and in OpenAlex. Each of those is a different kind of visibility: MLA and ERIH PLUS speak to the humanities community that is the journal's core readership; CEEOL gives it a Central and Eastern European full-text presence; DOAJ certifies its open-access practice; Scopus-derived listings feed the metric summaries discussed below. Authors needing a particular index for an institutional rule should verify that index directly by ISSN — 1224-3086 or 2457-7715 — and date the check, rather than relying on any profile, including this one.

Metrics, with attribution

OpenAlex, resolved through its ISSN endpoint for either ISSN to the single source S2738849737, records 362 works and 268 citations for British and American Studies, with summary statistics of an h-index of 5, an i10-index of 4 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.055. OpenAlex gives the journal's homepage in its older form and its country as Romania, both consistent with the record here. SCImago-derived summaries consulted for this profile give a SCImago Journal Rank of 0.113 and a best quartile of Q3, with a Web of Science-derived impact figure reported as below 0.1 in one such summary. The stored Journals World record's h-index of 3 appears to be an older figure superseded in the OpenAlex data above; this profile reports both with their sources rather than merging them into a single invented number.

Interpretation matters more than the digits. An annual humanities journal publishing in literary and linguistic studies will have low citation counts by the standards of the sciences, because its field cites slowly, cites books, and cites in several languages, much of which citation databases capture incompletely. A Q3 placement and an SJR a little above 0.1 place B.A.S. in the broad middle-to-lower range of its Scopus categories, which is a normal position for a national society journal of its kind, and neither figure measures the journal's usefulness to the European English-studies community, its thirty-volume continuity, or the quality of an individual article. No author should choose or avoid this journal on a metric alone; fit, audience, the absence of charges, and a clear annual deadline are the rational grounds, and they are all verifiable from the journal's own records as set out above.

Guidance for authors

Work to the calendar first: manuscripts for the next year's issue are due by 1 October, must be in English, must be original and unpublished elsewhere, and must arrive formatted to the journal's instructions, because unformatted work is not sent for review. Obtain the current style sheet — the journal publishes one, updated in recent years — and follow it in the submitted draft, not in a later revision. Address the work to bas-journal.ro and to recent volumes: read the last two or three volumes, which are openly accessible, note how articles frame their anglophone material for a European English-studies readership, and cite relevant B.A.S. work where it genuinely bears on yours.

Second, use the journal's strengths. Translation studies, reception and imagology, English linguistics as practised in a European department, and literary studies that connect canonical and contemporary anglophone writing to European readers are all conversations this journal visibly sustains. Third, plan for the recorded 30-week publication time and the annual cycle: a paper accepted after the October deadline appears the following year, so this is a journal for considered work, not for results that must appear within a quarter. Finally, take the integrity policy at face value — originality is checked, plagiarism ends a submission, and post-publication fraud is marked publicly — and keep your own records of submission date, version and correspondence, as you should with any journal.

Frequently asked questions

What are the journal's ISSNs? Print ISSN 1224-3086 and electronic ISSN 2457-7715, verified in DOAJ and OpenAlex.

Who publishes it? Editura Universității de Vest, the West University of Timișoara's publishing house, for the journal of the Romanian Society of English and American Studies, according to its DOAJ record and its own volumes.

Does it charge authors? No. Its DOAJ record states no article processing charge and no other charges.

What licence do articles carry? CC BY-NC-ND, according to its DOAJ record; open access began in 2015 on that record.

When is the deadline? 1 October each year, for consideration for the next year's issue, according to the journal's editorial policy.

Is it the same as the Brașov conference volume of the same name? No. That is a separate Transilvania University of Brașov publication. The Timișoara journal is identified by ISSN 1224-3086 and 2457-7715.

Conclusion

British and American Studies is a thirty-volume-strong, annual, peer-reviewed, charge-free open-access journal of English studies from the West University of Timișoara and the Romanian Society of English and American Studies, edited by Hortensia Pârlog with a senior international board, indexed across the humanities services its readers actually use, and governed by a published editorial and integrity policy with a clear 1 October deadline. Its metrics are modest and are given here with their sources; its durable value is as a European home for literary, linguistic, cultural and translation studies of the anglophone world.