Casopis za Suvremenu Povijest

About Casopis za Suvremenu Povijest

Časopis za suvremenu povijest — Journal of Contemporary History: A Complete Profile

Časopis za suvremenu povijest, published in English as the Journal of Contemporary History, is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal in modern and contemporary history published by the Croatian Institute of History (Hrvatski institut za povijest) in Zagreb, Croatia. It is one of the longest-running history journals in Croatia: the portal of Croatian scientific and professional journals, HRČAK, records its first year of publication as 1969, and the journal has appeared continuously since then, currently at a frequency of three issues per year. Its print ISSN is 0590-9597 and its online ISSN is 1848-9079. The journal carries the CODEN CSUPER, the UDK classification 949.75, and the DOI prefix 10.22586/csp, under which individual articles receive persistent identifiers. This profile explains what the journal publishes, how its editorial and peer-review system works, how it is indexed, what its citation indicators do and do not show, and what authors should check before submitting.

A naming caution is essential at the outset, because it causes real confusion in databases and library catalogues. The English rendering Journal of Contemporary History is also the exact title of a completely separate, well-known British journal published by SAGE in the United Kingdom (ISSN 0022-0094 and 1461-7250). The two journals share no ISSN, no publisher, no country and no editorial office. The Croatian journal profiled here is the one with ISSN 0590-9597 (print) and 1848-9079 (online), published from Zagreb by the Croatian Institute of History. Whenever you cite, submit to, or evaluate this journal, anchor the identification to those ISSNs and to the HRČAK record, not to the English title alone. JournalsWorld maintains separate records for the two titles precisely because title-only matching merges them incorrectly.

Identity and Quick Facts

The JournalsWorld record for this post stored the publisher as a bare numeric code in its template text. That number is a database artefact: the publisher taxonomy term attached to the record resolves to Hrvatski institut za povijest, the Croatian Institute of History, which is also the publisher named by HRČAK and by the journal itself. Readers should always read the publisher as the Croatian Institute of History. Similarly, the old template described the journal as focusing on “Q2”; Q2 is not a subject. It is a quartile band within a Scopus subject category — in this case History — and it belongs in the metrics discussion below, not in a description of scope.

History and Standing of the Journal

HRČAK dates the journal to 1969, which makes it a product of the Yugoslav-era development of institutional history research in Croatia and a survivor of every subsequent transformation of the Croatian research system: the independence period of the early 1990s, the post-war rebuilding of archives and universities, and the later integration of Croatian scholarship into European indexing and evaluation frameworks. The publisher's own name reflects that history — the institute that publishes the journal is the national institute for historical research, and the journal has functioned throughout its life as one of the principal venues in which the institute's researchers and their collaborators present work on the modern period. A bibliometric study of the journal's first fifty years (1969–2018), published in the Open Access Library, counted 1,043 scholarly works over that period and documented an average annual volume of roughly 700 pages, rising to between about 900 and 1,330 pages per year during the 2000s — evidence of a substantial, continuously produced journal rather than an occasional bulletin.

In 2003 the journal was classified in Croatia's A1 category, the national classification for journals whose quality is considered on a par with journals operating an internationally recognised reviewing process, according to the description carried on HRČAK. That classification matters inside the Croatian academic system, where national journal categories feed into appointment, promotion and project-evaluation decisions, and it helps explain why the journal remains a first-choice domestic venue for Croatian historians of the modern period even though its citation counts, measured in international databases, look modest. National importance and international citation visibility are different things, and this journal is a clear case of the difference.

Scope: What the Journal Publishes

The journal publishes research results important for contemporary history, in the formulation carried by HRČAK and the Central and Eastern European Online Library (CEEOL). CEEOL's fuller description clarifies the chronological span: modern history, that is, the nineteenth century through to contemporary times. The journal publishes the results of scholarly projects carried out at the Croatian Institute of History as well as research articles prepared outside the institute and submitted to the editorial board. Alongside archival research, the journal works to uphold scholarly criticism and to advance the methodology of historical science.

The categories of material published, as described by CEEOL, include archival research articles, review articles, and reports from the proceedings of conferences, together with book reviews, research notes, information bulletins, and scholarly criticism and reflections. The journal at times also publishes primary documents and archival sources that contribute to a better understanding of history. This mixture — original archival articles at the core, surrounded by reviews, notes, documents and debate — is the classic structure of a national historical journal, and prospective authors should read it as a scope signal: the editors expect work grounded in sources, engaged with historiography, and written for readers who know the regional context.

Thematically, the centre of gravity is Croatia and its wider region within European and world history of the last two centuries: the Habsburg and Yugoslav contexts, the two world wars and their aftermaths, the socialist period, the wars of the 1990s and the post-socialist transition, and the political, social, cultural and economic history that connects them. OpenAlex's topic mapping for the journal's record, which is discussed in the metrics section, independently reflects this profile, assigning its largest topic clusters to the Balkans, Central European national history, the world wars, and Eastern European communism and reforms. That is aggregator evidence, not an editorial statement, but it matches the journal's stated scope and its contents as visible on HRČAK. Work on other regions is not excluded by the stated scope — the test is importance for contemporary history — but a manuscript with no connection to the journal's readership, sources or debates will face an uphill case at editorial screening.

Language is part of scope for this journal. It is a Croatian-language journal with an international-facing apparatus: titles, summaries and the journal's own presentation are carried in English as well as Croatian on HRČAK, and the journal is read through platforms such as CEEOL by scholars who do not read Croatian but work on the region. Authors should follow the current author guidelines on HRČAK for the language or languages of submission and for summary requirements, rather than assuming that English-only submission is either required or sufficient.

Editorial Structure and Peer Review

HRČAK lists the editor-in-chief as Branko Ostajmer and the assistant editor as Stipica Grgić, with the editorial office at the Croatian Institute of History, Opatička 10 in Zagreb. CEEOL's description adds that the editorial board is made up in part by members of the Croatian Institute of History, that some members come from outside the institute, and that the international members of the board have included prominent historians from Germany, Serbia, Poland, Ireland, Slovenia, Norway, Russia, Hungary and the Netherlands, with Darjan Godić named as journal secretary in that description. Board composition changes over time, so treat named individuals as the composition at the time of the source you consult and check the current impressum on HRČAK before addressing correspondence.

Peer review is described by HRČAK as double anonymised — manuscripts are anonymised and reviewers are not identified to authors — applied to scientific and professional papers within a national peer-review system. The journal carries a published Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement and separate guidelines for authors, for references and for reviewers on its HRČAK pages, which is the operational documentation a submitting author needs. The call for papers is always open, per HRČAK, and manuscripts are sent to the editorial board exclusively through the journal's web address on the HRČAK OJS system; authors who have problems with submission are directed to contact the editorial board by email. Do not submit by post or through third parties, and do not treat the editor's personal email address, which HRČAK lists as a contact, as a substitute for the submission system.

Access, Licensing and Charges

HRČAK describes the Journal of Contemporary History as an open access journal. Users are allowed to read, download, copy, redistribute, print, search and link to the material, and to alter, transform or build upon it, or use it for any other lawful purpose, as long as they attribute the source appropriately under the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC 4.0. Papers published in the journal can be deposited and self-archived in institutional and thematic repositories providing a link to the journal's web pages and HRČAK; the self-archiving policy is also indexed at Sherpa/RoMEO, where the journal is recorded as permitting deposit of pre-print, post-print and publisher's versions. HRČAK further states that the journal does not charge article processing charges. In short: reading is free, reuse is permitted for non-commercial purposes with attribution, archiving is expressly allowed, and authors are not charged an APC according to the portal record. If any of these terms matter to a funder or an institution, verify them against the journal's current pages at the moment of submission, because licences and policies are the publisher's to update.

One indexing nuance follows from this access model. In the foreground check carried out for this profile, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) search API returned no record for ISSN 0590-9597. Open access and DOAJ listing are not the same thing: this journal is openly readable under a Creative Commons licence through HRČAK, but a DOAJ record could not be verified in that check, so this profile does not claim DOAJ listing for it. OpenAlex likewise flags the journal as open access while recording it as not in DOAJ, which is consistent with the direct DOAJ result.

Indexing and Discoverability

According to HRČAK, the journal is referenced in the Croatian Bibliography, Series B; the Central and Eastern European Online Library (CEEOL); the European Reference Index for the Humanities and the Social Sciences (ERIH PLUS); Historical Abstracts (EBSCOhost); the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS); Scopus; Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory; and the Web of Science Core Collection, Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI). That combination is meaningful. Scopus and ESCI place the journal inside the two citation ecosystems most often used in formal evaluation. ERIH PLUS is the European humanities reference index whose criteria speak directly to this journal's peer-review and editorial standards. CEEOL and the EBSCO and ProQuest-era bibliographies (Historical Abstracts, IBSS) are where historians of the region actually search. An author publishing here can therefore honestly claim Scopus and ESCI indexing, while remembering that ESCI journals historically sat outside the Journal Impact Factor lists until Clarivate extended JIF assignment across the Core Collection in recent years — check the current JCR entry rather than repeating any impact factor figure for this journal that you cannot trace to JCR itself.

Metrics: Reading the Numbers Carefully

The citation indicators for this journal are small in absolute terms, and every figure in this section is attributed to the database that produced it, because the databases disagree in method even where they roughly agree in scale. The JournalsWorld stored record gave an h-index of 6. SCImago data, as summarised by Resurchify from Scopus, likewise gives an h-index of 6, an SJR of 0.16, a best quartile of Q2 in the History category, an overall rank of 23740, coverage recorded as 2001 and 2013–2024, and an impact score of 0.18; the same source counts the journal as cited by a total of 13 articles during the preceding three years. A separate aggregator summary of 2024 metrics reported a Journal Impact Factor of 0.20 — treat that as an aggregator-reported figure attributed to Web of Science data, and verify it in JCR before using it in any formal context.

OpenAlex tells a compatible but distinct story. In a direct foreground fetch of the OpenAlex source record S4210210766 (display name “Journal of Contemporary History”, ISSN-L 0590-9597, host the Croatian Institute of History), OpenAlex counted 237 works, 414 citations, an h-index of 5, an i10-index of 3, and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.04, with 232 of the 237 works recorded as open access. OpenAlex's year coverage for the record begins in 2017, which reflects its own source coverage, not the journal's 1969 founding — a textbook example of why a database's “first year” must never be copied into a journal's history. The differences between the Scopus-based h-index of 6 and the OpenAlex h-index of 5 are methodological: different source universes, different document-type handling, different citation matching. Neither is “the” h-index in the abstract; each is the h-index within its database.

What should an author conclude? This is a nationally central, internationally indexed history journal whose citation footprint is that of a regional-language humanities title: deep archival influence, much of it exercised through books, national debates and teaching, and only partly visible to citation counters. A Q2 placement in Scopus's History category shows it is not at the bottom of its indexed peer group. If your evaluation system rewards any Scopus-indexed publication, it qualifies. If it rewards only high-JIF English-language generalist history journals, it will not compete on that axis — and no honest profile should pretend otherwise.

Publishing in This Journal: Practical Guidance

Submissions go through the HRČAK OJS page for the journal; the call for papers is always open. Before submitting, read the journal's own Guidelines for Authors and Guidelines for References on HRČAK and format the manuscript to them exactly, including the reference style; national journals with small editorial offices return non-compliant manuscripts without review, and the journal's published reviewer guidelines signal a formal process. Expect double anonymised review: prepare an anonymised manuscript file and keep identifying information where the guidelines direct. Write for the journal's actual conversation — cite the relevant Croatian and regional historiography where it exists, make archival sources and their repositories explicit, and provide the English-language apparatus (title, summary, keywords) the journal's format requires so that non-Croatian readers can find and cite the work through CEEOL, Scopus and HRČAK. Because the journal appears three times a year and publishes substantial volumes, plan on a realistic national-journal timeline rather than a commercial publisher's service-level schedule, and use the editorial email only for genuine submission problems, as HRČAK directs.

Ethics expectations are documented, not implied: the journal publishes a Publication Ethics and Malpractice Statement, and authors should treat archival citation honestly — cite the fond, box and document you actually saw, flag copies and secondary reproductions, and disclose where access restrictions shaped the evidence. For twentieth-century topics involving living persons or sensitive personal data, expect the editors to care about archival law and privacy, and address those questions in the manuscript rather than leaving them to reviewers.

Who Should — and Should Not — Submit

Strong fits: archival or historiographical research on nineteenth- to twenty-first-century Croatia, Yugoslavia, and Central and South-Eastern Europe; work from institute or university projects in that area; review articles and conference reports that map a debate for the regional field; and editions of primary documents with scholarly apparatus. Weaker fits: purely theoretical work with no historical evidence base; contemporary political commentary without archival or systematic sources; and manuscripts whose natural home is a generalist English-language journal and whose authors need a high Journal Impact Factor for a specific evaluation rule. Neither list is a judgement of quality — they are statements about audience. The journal's readers are the historians of the region, and papers that speak to them are the papers that get used.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Časopis za suvremenu povijest?
Print ISSN 0590-9597 and online ISSN 1848-9079, per HRČAK.

Is this the same journal as the SAGE Journal of Contemporary History?
No. The SAGE journal is a separate British title (ISSN 0022-0094 and 1461-7250). This profile covers the Croatian journal of the Croatian Institute of History; the shared English title is a translation collision.

Who publishes the journal and where?
The Croatian Institute of History (Hrvatski institut za povijest), Opatička 10, 10 000 Zagreb, Croatia, per HRČAK.

When was it founded and how often does it appear?
First year of publication 1969, three issues per year, per HRČAK.

Is it peer-reviewed?
Yes. HRČAK describes double anonymised peer review for scientific and professional papers.

Is it open access, and does it charge authors?
HRČAK records it as open access under CC BY-NC and states that it does not charge article processing charges. Verify current terms on the journal's pages before submitting.

Where is it indexed?
Per HRČAK: Scopus, Web of Science ESCI, ERIH PLUS, CEEOL, Historical Abstracts, IBSS, the Croatian Bibliography Series B and Ulrichsweb. A DOAJ record could not be verified in the foreground DOAJ search carried out for this profile.

What are its citation metrics?
Scopus-based data summarised by SCImago/Resurchify give an h-index of 6 and SJR 0.16 with a best quartile of Q2 in History; OpenAlex's direct record gives 237 works, 414 citations and an h-index of 5. Figures differ by database and change over time.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile is grounded in the journal's HRČAK portal record (identity, ISSNs, publisher, editor, frequency, review model, licensing, indexing), the CEEOL journal description (scope, article types, board character), SCImago data as summarised by Resurchify (SJR, quartile, Scopus-based h-index), a direct OpenAlex source fetch for S4210210766 (works, citations, topics), a direct DOAJ search-API check for ISSN 0590-9597, and a published fifty-year bibliometric study of the journal. Where a field could not be verified from those sources — for example current submission fees beyond the HRČAK no-APC statement — it is described as it stands in the cited source rather than filled in by assumption. Check the live HRČAK pages for the authoritative current state before submitting.