Castilla Estudios de Literatura

About Castilla Estudios de Literatura

Castilla: Estudios de Literatura — Journal Profile

Castilla: Estudios de Literatura is an annual, open-access digital journal of literary studies published by the Universidad de Valladolid (University of Valladolid) in Spain, through its university publishing service, Ediciones Universidad de Valladolid. Its electronic ISSN is 1989-7383 — the identifier recorded in this JournalsWorld record, in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and on the journal’s own platform on the university’s journal portal. The journal publishes original scholarly articles and previously unpublished book reviews on Spanish and Latin American literature, literary theory and criticism, and comparative literature, in Spanish and in English.

This profile explains what the journal is, how to verify its identity, what it publishes, how its peer review and open-access arrangements work, how its citation record looks in the open databases, and what a prospective author should check before submitting. Figures are attributed to the sources that produced them, and any point that could not be verified from a fetched source is stated plainly as such.

Quick Facts

Identity and How to Verify It

The journal’s identity rests on a single electronic ISSN, 1989-7383, because Castilla is a digital-only title in its current form. That number resolves consistently across independent sources fetched for this profile: the JournalsWorld record; the DOAJ record, which names the title as “Castilla: Estudios de Literatura”, the publisher as Universidad de Valladolid, the country as Spain and the languages as Spanish and English; and the OpenAlex source record S2738911231, resolved through the OpenAlex ISSN endpoint, which gives the journal’s homepage on the University of Valladolid portal and names the university as host organisation. A publication using this title with a different ISSN, or published from a different institution, should be treated as a different record until proven otherwise.

One small naming point deserves attention. The stored JournalsWorld title drops the colon and reads “Castilla Estudios de Literatura”, while the journal’s own title, as recorded in DOAJ and on its own portal, is “Castilla: Estudios de Literatura”. The difference is punctuation only and does not indicate a different journal, but cataloguers citing the title should use the journal’s own form, with the colon. The word “Castilla” in the title refers to the historic Castilian literary tradition and to the university’s home region of Castile and León, and the journal should not be confused with older Spanish periodicals that have carried similar regional names at other institutions.

Publisher and Setting

The University of Valladolid is one of Spain’s oldest universities, and its publishing service issues a family of scholarly journals through a shared open journal platform hosted by the university. Castilla sits on that platform alongside the university’s other titles, which gives it institutional hosting, a stable archive and the editorial infrastructure of a university press rather than a commercial owner. The journal’s editorial home is in the university’s literary studies community: its subject community is the study of literature in Spanish — Spanish peninsular literature, Latin American (Hispanic American) literature, and the theory that frames both — together with comparative work that places that writing alongside other traditions.

Directory listings based on SCImago data record the publisher as Ediciones Universidad de Valladolid and a coverage history in Scopus beginning in 2013, with the record in this catalogue noting coverage from 2013 onward. DOAJ records the journal as publishing in open access from 2009. Taken together, those two attributed data points describe a journal that was established in digital open-access form around the turn of the 2010s and entered the major citation index several years later. A fuller institutional history — founding editors, earlier series and issue-by-issue milestones — is set out on the journal’s own portal; where this profile could not fetch a primary statement of a historical detail, it does not invent one.

Aims and Scope

The journal’s own scope statement, as carried in DOAJ and in directory summaries of its aims, describes an annual digital journal publishing original scholarly articles on Spanish or Latin American literature, literary theory and criticism, and comparative literature, together with unpublished book reviews in the same fields, in Spanish or English. Four strands therefore define its territory.

First, Spanish literature: writing from Spain across its periods, from medieval and Golden Age texts through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to the present, studied critically, historically or theoretically. Second, Latin American and Hispanic American literature: the literatures of Spanish-speaking America, including their regional traditions and their contemporary production. Third, literary theory and criticism as subjects in their own right: poetics, narratology, genre theory, reception, and the critical methods by which literary texts are read. Fourth, comparative literature: work that reads Spanish-language writing alongside other literatures, or that tests comparative frameworks on Hispanic material.

Directory descriptions of the journal’s published content add texture to that brief. They note a recurring concern with the cultural and historical settings of literary works; with gender and identity in literature, including the representation of women and of minority voices; and with poetics and aesthetics — the study of form, style and artistic choice. In practice this means the journal welcomes both single-author and single-text studies, when they are argued to a standard that interests specialists beyond the immediate topic, and broader essays on periods, movements, genres and methods. Book reviews form a recognised part of the programme: reviews must be of recent scholarly books in the journal’s fields and must themselves be unpublished.

What the Journal Publishes

Each annual issue gathers research articles and book reviews. Because the journal appears once a year, its issues function as substantial collections rather than as rapid communications: an accepted article waits for the annual issue, and the journal’s value to authors lies in considered placement in a specialist, indexed, no-fee venue rather than in speed — although DOAJ records an average publication time of about six weeks in its data field for the journal’s process, a figure authors should read as the directory’s recorded statistic and confirm against the journal’s current guidance, since annual-issue scheduling shapes real timelines.

The article genres that fit the journal follow from its scope: critical studies of Spanish and Latin American authors, works and periods; theoretical essays; comparative studies; studies of literature’s relations with history, culture and society; and work on gender, identity and representation in Hispanic writing. Research written from neighbouring disciplines — cultural history, for example, or the study of translation — fits when its centre of gravity is literary. Work with no literary object, and work on literatures with no Hispanic or comparative connection, falls outside the stated scope and belongs in other venues.

Editorial Process and Peer Review

DOAJ records the journal’s review model as double anonymous peer review: neither author nor reviewer knows the other’s identity. The journal’s editorial board is published on its portal (DOAJ links the board page on the Valladolid platform), and submissions are made through that same platform, where the current author instructions also live. Authors retain copyright in their work (DOAJ records author-retained copyright), and published articles carry a Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY), which permits reuse with attribution — the most permissive of the standard Creative Commons licences and the model favoured by European open-access policy for publicly funded research.

Two practical consequences follow for authors. The first is that anonymity must be built into the manuscript itself: identifying material belongs in the submission metadata and title page arrangements the platform requests, not in the article file. The second is that the CC BY licence and author-retained copyright make the version of record freely reusable in repositories, teaching and later publications with attribution, which suits the journal’s university mission of widening access to Hispanic literary scholarship. Exact formatting rules, length expectations, referencing style and the current call timetable are stated in the journal’s own submission pages; they are the governing source and should be checked at the point of submission, because this profile does not reproduce rules it could not fetch in full from the journal’s portal in this session (the portal returned an access restriction to this session’s direct fetch, so its detailed guidelines are reported here only as DOAJ records them).

Open Access and Charges

Castilla is a genuine open-access journal in the directory sense: it is listed in DOAJ, its content is free to read on the university platform, and DOAJ records that it charges authors nothing — no article processing charge and no other charges — with publication supported institutionally by the university. In the vocabulary of open-access publishing this is the “diamond” model: free to read and free to publish, funded by an institution rather than by readers or authors. For researchers without grant funding for publication fees, particularly in the humanities where such funding is scarce, a no-fee indexed journal is a significant practical advantage, and it also removes any question of the journal’s incentives being tied to acceptance volume.

Metrics and Citation Record

OpenAlex, resolved through its ISSN endpoint in this session, records the journal (source S2738911231) with approximately 1,131 works and approximately 642 citations, an h-index of 8 and an i10-index of 8 in its summary statistics, and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.07. OpenAlex lists its leading topics as Spanish literature and culture studies, Latin American literature analysis, early modern Spanish literature, comparative literary analysis and criticism, and Spanish philosophy and literature. The thinner JournalsWorld record from which this profile was built carried a SCImago-derived h-index of 7, which is close to the OpenAlex figure and, allowing for the different corpora the two databases count, consistent with it.

These are small numbers beside those of large international titles, and they should be interpreted in context rather than apologised for. Literary studies is a book-centred, slow-citing field; much of its scholarship is written in Spanish for a specialist readership; and an annual journal publishes few articles each year, so its citation totals accumulate slowly. Directory summaries based on SCImago data report the journal’s best quartile as Q2 for 2024 in its subject category. For authors in Spanish and Latin American literary studies, the relevant standing is the journal’s recognition inside that specialist community — Scopus coverage since 2013, DOAJ listing, university stewardship — rather than any global ranking.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal’s verified listings, from sources fetched for this profile, are: DOAJ (full record, including licence, review model and publisher data); Scopus coverage from 2013, as recorded in SCImago-derived directory data; and the OpenAlex source record described above. Spanish humanities journals are also typically carried in national and regional scholarly directories for the Hispanic world; claims about any specific additional index should be checked against the journal’s own portal, which maintains its current indexing list, and this profile makes no listing claim it did not verify. Discoverability is helped by the platform itself: the university portal exposes article metadata to scholarly search engines, and the CC BY licence permits the text to be mirrored in institutional repositories, widening the routes by which a reader can reach an article.

How to Submit

Submissions are made through the journal’s pages on the University of Valladolid journal portal, where the current instructions to authors, the editorial board and the submission system are found. Before submitting, an author should: confirm the manuscript falls inside the stated fields — Spanish or Latin American literature, literary theory and criticism, or comparative literature; prepare the text in Spanish or English; anonymise the manuscript for double anonymous review; follow the portal’s current formatting and referencing instructions exactly; and, for a book review, confirm the book is a recent scholarly publication in the journal’s fields and that the review is unpublished. Because the journal is annual, authors should note the current issue’s timetable on the portal and plan around a yearly cycle rather than a rolling one.

Reading the Journal: Themes and Patterns

Read across its recent annual issues, the journal’s table of contents shows how its scope works in practice. Studies of Golden Age writing — the Spanish literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — sit alongside essays on the modern and contemporary novel, on poetry, and on theatre. Latin American coverage ranges across national traditions rather than concentrating on a single country, and comparative pieces place Hispanic texts in dialogue with writing in other languages. The keywords recorded in the journal’s DOAJ entry — literary theory, comparative literature, Spanish literature, Latin American literature and Hispanic American literature — are a fair map of that spread, and the subject classes assigned there (language and literature generally, and the Romance literatures class that covers French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese) confirm the journal’s placement inside the broader Romance-studies landscape as libraries organise it.

The book-review section deserves a word of its own, because in literary studies reviews do real scholarly work. A review in Castilla is expected to be an unpublished, substantive engagement with a recent scholarly book — situating the book in its field, summarising its argument fairly and assessing its contribution — rather than a publisher’s notice. For early-career scholars, a well-placed review in an indexed journal of this kind is often a first step into the field’s printed conversation, and the journal’s willingness to publish reviews alongside articles is part of how it serves the discipline’s younger researchers as well as its established names.

Who Reads and Cites It

The journal’s natural readership is the international community of Hispanists: scholars and graduate students of Spanish and Latin American literature in Spain, in Latin America, and in the many universities elsewhere — in Europe, North America and beyond — where Hispanic studies is taught. Because the journal is free to read, that readership is not limited to institutions with subscription budgets, which matters in a field whose scholars are spread across countries with very different library resources. Indexing in Scopus places its contents in the discovery systems that universities use for evaluation and literature searching, and its presence in DOAJ places it in the directories that librarians and funders consult when they assess open-access venues. Authors should nonetheless be realistic about audience: this is a specialist journal read closely by the people who work on its exact subjects, and its articles are written for that expert readership, in the technical vocabulary of literary scholarship, rather than for general readers.

Similar Journals

Authors in this field commonly also consider other Spanish university journals of Hispanic literary studies, among them Anales de Literatura Española (Universidad de Alicante), Revista de Literatura (CSIC), Dicenda (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Bulletin of Spanish Studies for an English-language international venue, and Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica for philological and literary work from Mexico. Fit should be judged by the conversation each journal hosts: Castilla’s particular profile is the combination of Spanish and Latin American coverage, theory and comparative openness, annual university publication and a no-fee open-access model.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the journal’s ISSN? Its electronic ISSN is 1989-7383. It is a digital journal, and that single ISSN is the identifier recorded by DOAJ, OpenAlex and this catalogue.

Is it open access, and does it charge? Yes, it is open access and listed in DOAJ; DOAJ records no article processing charge and no other charges, and articles appear under a CC BY licence with copyright retained by authors.

How is peer review conducted? By double anonymous peer review, as recorded in the journal’s DOAJ record.

How often does it appear, and in which languages? Annually, publishing in Spanish and English.

Who publishes it? The Universidad de Valladolid, through its university publishing service, on the university’s journal portal.

Is it indexed in Scopus? Directory data derived from SCImago records coverage from 2013; authors should confirm the current list on the journal’s portal, as index coverage can change.

Sources and Verification

This profile is based on sources fetched in this session: the live JournalsWorld record for post 27822 (title and ISSN); the DOAJ search API record for ISSN 1989-7383 (title, publisher, country, languages, CC BY licence, author-retained copyright, no charges, double anonymous review, open-access start year, publication-time statistic, keywords and subject classes); the OpenAlex source record S2738911231 resolved through the ISSN endpoint (works, citations, h-index, i10-index, two-year mean citedness, topics, host organisation and homepage); and SCImago-derived directory summaries returned in search results (publisher imprint, Scopus coverage from 2013, annual frequency and best quartile). The journal’s own portal could not be fetched in full in this session, so no claim in this profile depends on text that was not actually retrieved. A twin check against the JournalsWorld catalogue found no other record carrying ISSN 1989-7383; the title search returned only other journals whose own ISSNs are different.