Endeavour

About Endeavour

Endeavour: A Complete Profile of Elsevier's History and Philosophy of Science Journal

Endeavour is a quarterly peer-reviewed international journal dedicated to the history and philosophy of science, published by Elsevier Ltd in the United Kingdom. It was established in 1942, began as a scientific review publication published by Imperial Chemical Industries, and has developed into one of the leading journals in the history and philosophy of science, technology and medicine. Its print ISSN is 0160-9327 and its online ISSN is 1873-1929, as shown on its ScienceDirect journal page. Elsevier describes it as a journal that publishes high-quality articles on a wide array of scientific topics from ancient to modern, across all disciplines, serving as a critical forum for the interdisciplinary exploration and evaluation of natural knowledge and its development throughout history — and as a journal whose issues carry rich colour and black-and-white illustration, making it an ideal destination for history and philosophy of science articles with a strong visual component.

This profile sets out, in one place, the journal's identity and long history, its publisher, its scope and article types, its editorial leadership, the metrics that can be verified from named sources, its indexing position, its two publishing routes and what each costs, practical guidance on submitting, a comparison with neighbouring journals in the history of science, and answers to the questions readers most often ask. Every figure is attributed to its source, and anything that could not be verified from a source actually consulted is stated as such.

Quick Facts

• Title: Endeavour
• Print ISSN: 0160-9327
• Online ISSN: 1873-1929
• Publisher: Elsevier Ltd, United Kingdom (publisher taxonomy on this JournalsWorld record; ScienceDirect journal page)
• Founded: 1942 (Elsevier)
• Frequency: Quarterly (Elsevier)
• Discipline: History and philosophy of science, including the history of technology and medicine
• Editors-in-Chief: Edward Guimont (Bristol Community College, United States) and Sarah Pickman (United States), per the ScienceDirect journal page at the time of checking
• CiteScore: 1.4 (ScienceDirect journal page, at the time of checking)
• Journal Impact Factor: 0.4 (ScienceDirect journal page, at the time of checking)
• Open access route: Optional; article publishing charge USD 3,220 excluding taxes (ScienceDirect)
• Subscription route: No publication fee charged to authors; articles are immediately available to subscribers (ScienceDirect)
• DOAJ: No listing — a DOAJ search API query for ISSN 0160-9327 returned zero results at the time of checking, which is expected for a hybrid journal of this kind

History: From an Industrial Review to a Scholarly Journal

Endeavour's origin is unusual among scholarly journals, and it explains both its name and its enduring house style. It began in 1942 as a scientific review publication published by Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) — a review of the latest developments in science that has since evolved beyond its company-published origin. Over its long history it evolved away from that reviewing, company-published origin into a fully scholarly journal covering the history and philosophy of science, technology and medicine, and it passed to Elsevier, under whose imprint it appears today as a quarterly. Elsevier's own summary honours that arc directly: "Endeavour, established in 1942, has, over its long and proud history, developed into one of the leading journals in the history and philosophy of science."

The JournalsWorld record for this post carries a coverage statement of 1947–1949 and 1958–2025, which reflects the coverage windows recorded in bibliographic databases rather than the journal's founding date; the founding date given by the publisher is 1942. Readers tracing early volumes should therefore expect the wartime and immediate post-war history of the title to be documented differently in different catalogues, and should work from the publisher's archive on ScienceDirect for the run of the modern scholarly journal. What is not in doubt is the continuity of the title, of the two ISSNs, and of the journal's identity as a venue where the development of natural knowledge is explored and evaluated historically and philosophically.

Two inheritances from the ICI review era still shape the journal. The first is accessibility: Elsevier states that Endeavour presents the history and philosophy of science in a clear and accessible manner, ensuring the journal is a valuable tool for historians, philosophers, practising scientists and general readers alike. The second is the visual tradition: issues contain extensive colour and black-and-white illustrations, and the journal actively suits articles whose argument depends on images — instruments, specimens, expedition photographs, diagrams, museum objects — reproduced to a high standard. A journal founded to show science to the public has become a journal that studies how science was made, without surrendering either habit.

Scope and Article Types

Elsevier's aims and scope for Endeavour can be summarised faithfully in three claims. It is a quarterly international journal dedicated to the history and philosophy of science. It publishes high-quality articles on a wide array of scientific topics from ancient to modern, across all disciplines, with extensive material focusing on the life sciences, technology and medicine. And it serves as a critical forum for the interdisciplinary exploration and evaluation of natural knowledge and its development throughout history. There is no chronological cut-off and no single disciplinary fence: a paper on ancient astronomy, on early modern natural philosophy, on nineteenth-century field collecting, on twentieth-century laboratory life or on the philosophy of a contemporary science can all be in scope, provided the treatment is historical or philosophical rather than a report of new scientific results.

To enable the broadest coverage possible, Endeavour works with distinct article types, described by the publisher as follows. Feature research articles are concise, fully referenced, and beautifully illustrated with high-quality reproductions of the most important source material. In Vivo articles illustrate the rich and numerous connections between historical and philosophical scholarship and matters of current public interest, providing readable explanations of important current events from historical and philosophical perspectives. Book reviews and commentaries provide a picture of the rapidly growing history of science discipline, written by established and emerging scholars, giving a vibrant overview of the latest publications and media in the history and philosophy of science. The journal also publishes special issues and article collections: recent collections listed on its ScienceDirect page include work on the material culture of expeditionary science, on environmental histories of science in museums and collections, and on cultural heritage as an emergent field of multidisciplinary study — a fair map of where the journal's centre of gravity currently sits.

The practical test of fit is therefore double. A submission must be about science — its past, its concepts, its practices, its people, its instruments, its institutions — and it must treat that subject with the methods of history or philosophy: sources, context, argument and historiography. A purely scientific paper belongs in a science journal; a purely antiquarian note with no analytical claim will struggle here; a well-sourced, well-illustrated, accessibly written study of how knowledge was made, moved or contested is exactly the journal's home ground.

Publisher and Editorial Leadership

Endeavour is published by Elsevier Ltd in the United Kingdom — the publisher named in the taxonomy of this JournalsWorld record — and its journal home is ScienceDirect, Elsevier's full-text platform, where every issue, the guide for authors and the submission system are found. Copyright in the journal's pages is asserted by Elsevier Ltd. As with all Elsevier journals, the subscription and open access machinery, the production process and the platform are the publisher's, while scholarly direction rests with the editors.

The ScienceDirect journal page names two Editors-in-Chief: Edward Guimont, of Bristol Community College in the United States, and Sarah Pickman, also in the United States. Between them they also appear as editors of recent special collections on the page, which is typical of a hands-on editorship in a quarterly of this size. Editorial boards of large commercial journals change over time, and authors should confirm the current editors and board on the journal page at the moment of submission rather than relying on any secondary listing, including this profile. The named editorship matters for fit in one specific way: the journal's recent collections show an active interest in material culture, museums and collections, expeditionary science and the visual — authors working on the objects and images of science are writing for editors who have publicly built collections around those themes.

Metrics — Verified Figures and Their Sources

Endeavour's headline metrics, as displayed on its ScienceDirect journal page at the time of checking, are a CiteScore of 1.4 and a Journal Impact Factor of 0.4. CiteScore is Scopus's citation ratio and the impact factor is Clarivate's; both are recalculated on an annual cycle, so a reader who needs either figure for a formal purpose should re-take it from the journal page, Scopus or Journal Citation Reports at the time of use. The same ScienceDirect page publishes the journal's editorial timetable insights, also at the time of checking: 13 days from submission to first decision, 106 days from submission to decision after review, 233 days from submission to acceptance, and 9 days from acceptance to online publication. Those are the publisher's own service figures for the journal, and they sketch a realistic planning horizon — a fast first screen, a review stage measured in months, and rapid online appearance once a paper is accepted.

OpenAlex, resolving the journal through its ISSN endpoint to its source record for Endeavour, records a much larger historical canvas: 5,504 works, 116,550 citations to those works, an h-index of 153 and an i10-index of 1,363 (OpenAlex, at the time of checking). Those numbers must be read for what they are: OpenAlex counts the journal's entire long back-run, including decades of review-era and scholarly material, so its totals describe the accumulated weight of an eighty-year title rather than the current citation performance that CiteScore and the impact factor measure. The earlier JournalsWorld template record for this post gave an h-index of 33, a figure of the kind produced by a single database over a bounded window. The three families of numbers are not in conflict — they are counts of different sets over different periods — but they demonstrate why a bare h-index or impact figure quoted without its source and date is close to meaningless, and why this profile attributes every figure it gives.

Two honest limits complete the metrics picture. No acceptance rate for Endeavour could be verified from the publisher or another official source during the preparation of this profile, and none is claimed. And quartile labels attached to the journal in third-party listings vary by database, category and year — the category on this JournalsWorld record is Q3 — so any quartile should be quoted with its ranking source and year attached, or not quoted at all.

Indexing and Discoverability

Endeavour sits inside Elsevier's discovery ecosystem: its articles are published on ScienceDirect, the platform through which most institutional readers will reach them, and its CiteScore exists because the journal is covered by Scopus, Elsevier's abstract and citation database. OpenAlex's source record for the journal lists a range of national and bibliographic lists on which the title appears, including Medline — reflecting the journal's substantial history-of-medicine content — and a number of European national research-assessment journal lists. The journal is not listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals: a DOAJ search API query for its print ISSN returned no results at the time of checking, which is the expected position for a subscription journal with an optional open access route, since DOAJ lists fully open access titles. Authors whose funders require a DOAJ-listed venue, or immediate open access under a specific licence for every article, should read the next section carefully, because Endeavour can meet an open access mandate article by article — through its paid open access route or an institutional agreement — without being a fully open access journal.

Publishing Routes and Charges

Elsevier offers two routes in Endeavour, and the journal page prices them plainly. Under the open access route, the article publishing charge (APC) is USD 3,220, excluding taxes, at the time of checking; the page notes that actual APCs may differ based on individual author circumstances, and that an author's institution may have an agreement with Elsevier that fully or partially covers the charge for eligible authors. OpenAlex's record for the journal lists the same open access price family for the title, in several currencies. Under the subscription route, no publication fee is charged to authors, and published articles are immediately available to subscribers. That second route is the traditional one and remains the default experience for most history of science authors: no charge, publication behind the subscription wall, and free access for readers at subscribing institutions.

The choice between the routes should be made on mandate and money, not on prestige: the editorial process, the journal and the issue are the same either way. An author with a funder mandate for immediate open access, or with an institution holding an Elsevier read-and-publish agreement, will normally take the open access route and may pay nothing personally. An author with neither should understand that the subscription route costs nothing and is the route most of the journal's long archive travelled. What an author should not do is assume the open access charge buys speed or favour: the timetable figures quoted above are the journal's service figures as a whole, and Elsevier's stated model separates payment from editorial decision.

How to Submit

Submission is through the journal's ScienceDirect page, which carries the "Submit your article" entry point and the current guide for authors; authors should always work from the live guide, since article-type requirements and formatting expectations are the publisher's to change. Preparation for Endeavour, specifically, should attend to the journal's declared character. Articles are expected to be concise and fully referenced — the feature format is a disciplined argument, not a monograph chapter — and to be written accessibly enough for the journal's mixed readership of historians, philosophers, practising scientists and general readers. Where the argument depends on visual material, authors should assemble high-quality reproductions of the most important source material from the start, with permissions and captions in order, because illustration is a stated strength of the journal and a common cause of production delay when left late.

On timing, authors can plan from the publisher's own insights figures: a first decision in about a fortnight for papers screened quickly, around three and a half months to a decision after review, and — for papers that are accepted after revision — a total path to acceptance the publisher measures at 233 days, followed by online publication about nine days after acceptance. Those are averages over the journal's recent flow, not promises for an individual manuscript, and a special-issue timetable can differ from the ordinary one. Authors considering a special collection should read the collection's own call and deadlines on the journal page, since several collections are listed there with named guest editors. As with any Elsevier journal, the corresponding author should also settle the open access question — route, licence and any institutional agreement — at submission or acceptance, not after proofs, because the choice affects the paperwork the publisher issues.

Similar and Neighbouring Journals

The history and philosophy of science has a well-defined journal landscape, and Endeavour's neighbours are best understood by the niche each occupies. Isis, the journal of the History of Science Society, is the field's flagship general journal, for work aimed at the centre of the discipline. British Journal for the History of Science serves a similar general readership from its society base in Britain. Nuncius — whose JournalsWorld profile records its focus on the material and visual history of science — is the closest neighbour for visually and materially driven work, and authors choosing between Nuncius and Endeavour are usually choosing between two excellent homes for object- and image-centred history. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science leans further toward the philosophical end of the shared territory. History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences and Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences serve the life-science and medical concentrations that form a large part of Endeavour's own content, at higher specialisation. Annals of Science and Centaurus complete the usual comparison set for general history of science work. Against that set, Endeavour's distinctive combination is its accessible, illustrated, concise feature format, its breadth from ancient to modern across all disciplines, and its willingness to address readers beyond the profession — a combination that descends directly from its 1942 reviewing origins.

Is Endeavour Right for Your Paper?

Endeavour is likely to be right if your paper explores the development of natural knowledge — a science, a technology, a medicine — historically or philosophically; if it is concise, fully referenced and accessibly written; if it has a strong visual component the journal can reproduce well; or if you want a book review or commentary placed before the discipline's general readership. It is less likely to be right if your paper reports new scientific results rather than studying science itself, if it requires a fully open access, DOAJ-listed journal rather than an optional open access route, or if its natural home is a narrowly specialised journal of the history of one science. Fit, audience and format — the considerations the journal itself foregrounds — are the right grounds for the decision.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Endeavour?
The print ISSN is 0160-9327 and the online ISSN is 1873-1929, as shown on the journal's ScienceDirect page.

Who publishes Endeavour?
Elsevier Ltd, in the United Kingdom; the journal's home is ScienceDirect.

When was Endeavour founded?
In 1942, as a scientific review publication of Imperial Chemical Industries; it has since evolved into a scholarly journal of the history and philosophy of science.

How often does Endeavour publish?
Quarterly — four issues a year.

Who edits Endeavour?
The Editors-in-Chief named on the ScienceDirect journal page at the time of checking are Edward Guimont and Sarah Pickman.

What are Endeavour's metrics?
The ScienceDirect journal page at the time of checking gives a CiteScore of 1.4 and a Journal Impact Factor of 0.4. OpenAlex records 5,504 works and 116,550 citations across the journal's whole history.

Is Endeavour open access?
It is a hybrid journal. Authors may choose a subscription route with no publication fee, or an open access route with an article publishing charge of USD 3,220 excluding taxes, as priced on the journal page at the time of checking.

How long does review take at Endeavour?
Elsevier's insights figures for the journal at the time of checking are 13 days to first decision, 106 days to decision after review, 233 days to acceptance, and 9 days from acceptance to online publication.

Is Endeavour listed in DOAJ?
No listing was found: a DOAJ search API query for ISSN 0160-9327 returned zero results at the time of checking, which is expected for a hybrid subscription journal.

What kinds of articles does Endeavour publish?
Concise, fully referenced feature research articles; In Vivo articles connecting scholarship to current public interest; and book reviews and commentaries — alongside special issues and article collections, all within the history and philosophy of science, technology and medicine.