General Anthropology

About General Anthropology

General Anthropology — Journal Profile

General Anthropology is the bulletin journal of the General Anthropology Division (GAD) of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), published by Wiley on the association's AnthroSource platform. It is anchored on this JournalsWorld record by print ISSN 1537-1727 and online ISSN 1939-3466, the same pair carried by its OpenAlex source record (S192212196). One correction matters at the start: the thin template text that used to sit on this record gave the publisher as a bare database code and the country as the United Kingdom. The journal is in fact a United States society publication — Wiley publishes it for the AAA's General Anthropology Division, whose members work across every branch of anthropology — and that identity explains both its content and its readership. It is not a narrow research journal for one subfield. It is the shared bulletin of a division whose whole purpose is the breadth of the discipline, and its pages carry accessible writing about anthropology and applied anthropology for the widest professional audience the field has.

Reference summaries describe the journal as appearing in May and November each year, and its subtitle history tells the story plainly: earlier volumes carried the masthead Bulletin of the General Anthropology Division, and volume 22, number 1 (Spring 2015) still shows that bulletin character in its contents — a distinguished lecture, discussions of what general anthropology is and what its future should be, teaching material such as a classroom exercise on common-property resource management, and division business alongside scholarly essays. A reader who opens General Anthropology expecting a conventional archive of long research articles will misread it. Its value lies in short, readable pieces that speak across the four fields of anthropology — cultural anthropology, archaeology, biological anthropology and linguistic anthropology — and in its record of what the discipline, taken as a whole, has been arguing about.

At a Glance

History and Identity

The journal's history is the history of an organised constituency inside American anthropology. The General Anthropology Division exists within the American Anthropological Association to represent anthropologists whose work and teaching range across the discipline rather than inside one specialty, and its bulletin began in the 1990s as the printed voice of that constituency. OpenAlex dates the first publications it tracks for the title to 1994, and the Scopus coverage stored on this record — 1994–1995, then a gap, then a continuous run from 2003 to 2025 — reflects the uneven early life of a small society bulletin before its move onto Wiley's AnthroSource platform stabilised its online presence. On AnthroSource, the journal sits alongside the AAA's flagship titles, which matters for discovery: a short essay in General Anthropology is surfaced to the same searching members who read the association's research journals.

That bulletin origin still shapes the contents. Alongside scholarly essays, the journal has carried distinguished lectures delivered at the AAA annual meeting, forums in which several anthropologists answer a shared question, pieces about teaching anthropology, and reflections on the state of the field written for colleagues rather than for specialists. The 2015 issue described above is a fair sample of the mix: Conrad Kottak and colleagues debating the identity and future of general anthropology itself, the GAD distinguished lecture, and a practical classroom exercise that a teacher could lift straight into an introductory course. This is writing meant to be read by the whole profession, and its authors write accordingly — shorter formats, fewer specialist assumptions, and arguments about why anthropology matters beyond its own seminar rooms.

Scope and Subjects

The journal publishes, in the words of its reference description, information in the fields of anthropology and applied anthropology. In practice that means the whole discipline is in scope. OpenAlex's topic mapping for the source shows the spread concretely: its largest topic cluster is broad anthropological studies, followed by work on Pleistocene-era hominins and archaeology, forensic anthropology and bioarchaeology, evolution and palaeontology studies, and the ethics, history and culture of anthropology itself. No single region, period or method defines the journal. A piece on fossil hominins, a piece on forensic practice, a piece on the history of the discipline and a piece on classroom teaching can all belong in the same volume, provided each speaks to readers outside its own corner of the field.

Applied anthropology deserves a separate note, because it is half of the journal's stated territory. The General Anthropology Division has long included practitioners who work outside universities — in museums, agencies, development work, cultural-resource management and public-facing roles — and the journal gives that work a home inside the association's publishing programme. Contributions about anthropology in public life, anthropology for general audiences, and the profession's civic responsibilities fit the journal's mission in a way they might not fit a research journal organised around one method or one region. Authors considering the journal should therefore ask a different question from the one they would ask of a specialty title: not only "is this good anthropology?" but also "will anthropologists who do something quite different from me want to read this?"

Who Reads It and Why It Matters

The readership follows from the ownership. Members of the General Anthropology Division receive the journal as part of their division membership in the AAA, and AnthroSource access extends its reach to institutions that subscribe to the AAA journal package. Its natural readers are teachers of introductory anthropology, generalists, practitioners, and researchers who want a low-cost way to keep up with arguments outside their specialty. For libraries, the title is a small but telling part of an anthropology holding: it documents the discipline's internal conversation about itself — its teaching, its public role, its organisation — in a way that research journals, focused on results, do not.

For authors, the journal offers something the big research titles cannot: a venue where a well-made argument about the field itself is the contribution. Essays on the future of a subfield, reports on innovative teaching, and reflections on applied practice are citable, indexed publications here, with the AAA's imprimatur behind them. The citation counts discussed below are modest, as they are for every bulletin-style journal, but citation count is the wrong yardstick for a title whose primary circulation is to practising members of a profession.

Metrics and What They Mean

Two metric pictures exist for this journal, and they should not be mixed. The figures stored on this JournalsWorld record come from the Scopus-based SCImago tradition: an h-index of 8 and a Q4 standing. OpenAlex, checked for this profile through its ISSN endpoint, tells a slightly different story for its own database: 361 works carrying 655 citations, an h-index of 10, an i10-index of 11 (eleven works cited at least ten times), and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.10. Neither set is wrong; they count different corpora over different windows. What both agree on is the shape of the journal's impact: a society bulletin whose individual pieces are cited occasionally, and whose influence runs mainly through professional readership rather than through citation chains.

Read in that light, the numbers are respectable for the format. A twice-yearly bulletin accumulates a small denominator of citable items, so each citation moves its averages more than it would for a monthly research journal. The OpenAlex record also shows the title classed as a core source in that database and lists the host organisation as Wiley, which confirms the publishing arrangement described above. Anyone comparing General Anthropology with research journals on metrics alone will underrate it; anyone comparing it with other society bulletins will find a long-lived, continuously published title with a three-decade run — a durability many small journals never reach.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal's Scopus coverage, as stored on this record, spans 1994–1995 and 2003–2025, and its content is carried on Wiley's AnthroSource platform, the AAA's own full-text home, which is where most readers will in practice encounter it. OpenAlex indexes the source and resolves both of its ISSNs to a single record, so bibliometric tools built on OpenAlex will find it reliably. A search of the DOAJ database by ISSN, run for this profile, returned no listing, which fits the journal's model: it is a subscription and membership title, not an open-access journal. OpenAlex likewise records it as not an open-access journal overall, while noting that a minority of its works — 33 of the 361 it tracks — are openly accessible in some form, as individual authors deposit or license their pieces.

Fees and Open Access Options

OpenAlex lists article-processing prices for this title of US$3,090 (with euro and sterling equivalents of €2,580 and £2,060), figures that correspond to Wiley's optional open-access route for authors who need or wish to make a piece freely available. Treat those database-listed prices as a guide to be confirmed on the journal's current Wiley pages before relying on them, because publisher price lists change by year. The default route, however, is the traditional one: division members and AnthroSource subscribers read the journal as part of their membership or subscription, and authors are not required to pay to appear in it. No separate submission fee was verified from the sources consulted for this profile.

How to Publish in General Anthropology

Submissions are handled through the journal's home on AnthroSource and Wiley's author services, and the practical advice follows from the journal's character. First, write for the generalist: define specialist terms, keep the format short and essayistic, and make the stakes of the piece clear to an anthropologist from another subfield within the first page. Second, match the journal's standing genres — forum contributions, teaching pieces, applied-practice reflections, lectures and essays on the discipline — rather than submitting a conventional long research report, which belongs in one of the AAA's research journals. Third, check the current calls and editorial guidance on the journal's homepage before submitting, since bulletin journals often build issues around themes and invited forums. The names of the current editors could not be verified from the sources fetched for this profile, so authors should take editorial details from the journal's live homepage rather than from any directory listing, this one included.

Similar and Neighbouring Journals

Readers who use General Anthropology usually work across a small shelf of generalist titles. American Anthropologist is the AAA's flagship research journal and the natural next stop for full-length research across the four fields. Current Anthropology, from the University of Chicago Press, publishes research with open peer commentary and shares this journal's cross-disciplinary ambition at a larger scale. The Annual Review of Anthropology offers commissioned synthesis articles for readers who want a field surveyed rather than debated. Against those research titles, General Anthropology remains the accessible, profession-facing bulletin — the one most likely to be read cover to cover by the widest range of working anthropologists.

Reading the Journal Well: Genres, Citations and Classroom Use

Because the journal mixes genres, it rewards a different reading habit from a research title. The distinguished lectures and forum exchanges are the pieces most often cited, because they stake out positions that later writers must answer; the teaching pieces, by contrast, are used far more than they are cited, travelling into syllabi and course packs where citation databases cannot follow them. Librarians cataloguing the title should therefore resist judging it by citation yield alone. Its classroom value is visible in the kind of item the 2015 volume carried — a ready-made exercise on common-property resources built around the famous tragedy-of-the-commons argument — which an instructor can assign without adaptation. Few research journals publish anything an introductory teacher can use so directly.

Citation practice deserves care. The journal's title is generic enough to be confused with course names, textbook titles and the discipline itself, so references should always carry the ISSN or the AnthroSource journal code alongside the title, and indexers should note the alternate short title "GA" that OpenAlex records. Earlier volumes appeared under the fuller bulletin masthead naming the General Anthropology Division, and catalogue records that treat that masthead as a separate journal are describing the same publication in an earlier dress. The continuous thread is the pair of ISSNs on this record, which have anchored the title through its move from print bulletin to Wiley's online platform.

Finally, the journal's longevity is itself evidence. A small society bulletin that began in 1994, survived the print-to-online transition that killed many division newsletters, and was still publishing in 2025 — as both the Scopus coverage on this record and the OpenAlex record confirm — has demonstrated the one quality authors and librarians most need from a small title: it will still be there, with its archive intact on AnthroSource, when a citation made today is followed up in ten years' time. For a bulletin whose stock-in-trade is the discipline's conversation with itself, that archive is also a primary source: future historians of anthropology will read its forums and lectures to learn what the field argued about, in its own words, at the time.

A Note for Librarians and Indexers

Cataloguers should file the journal under its current title with the division named as corporate author, and should link, not duplicate, the earlier bulletin masthead, which is the same publication. The AnthroSource package is the normal access route for institutions; the print ISSN remains the anchor for holdings that predate the platform. Because the division's members are the journal's first audience, circulation claims in publisher material should be read as membership distribution rather than newsstand sale, and the title's presence in a library's anthropology holding is best justified on teaching and professional-coverage grounds: it is frequently the only AAA title an undergraduate will ever open, which makes it a working part of a teaching collection rather than a research luxury.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of General Anthropology?
Print ISSN 1537-1727 and online ISSN 1939-3466. Both resolve to a single OpenAlex source record, S192212196.

Who publishes General Anthropology?
Wiley publishes it for the General Anthropology Division of the American Anthropological Association. The publisher code and United Kingdom country shown in older directory data are database artefacts and are corrected here.

Is General Anthropology peer-reviewed?
It is a scholarly society bulletin published within the AAA's journal programme; its mix of essays, lectures, forums and teaching material is editorially reviewed rather than run as a conventional research-article pipeline. Authors should confirm the review route for their article type on the journal homepage.

What metrics does General Anthropology have?
OpenAlex, at checking time, records 361 works, 655 citations, an h-index of 10 and an i10-index of 11. The SCImago-derived figures stored on this record give an h-index of 8 and Q4 standing. The difference reflects the databases counted, not an error in either.

Is General Anthropology open access?
No. It is a membership and subscription journal; a DOAJ search by ISSN returned no listing. An optional paid open-access route exists through Wiley, with database-listed prices around US$3,090, to be confirmed on the publisher's current pages.

How often does General Anthropology appear?
Twice yearly, described in reference sources as appearing in May and November.

Where is General Anthropology published from?
It is a United States society journal: Wiley publishes it for the American Anthropological Association's General Anthropology Division, and its archive lives on the AAA's AnthroSource platform.

What should I submit to General Anthropology?
Short, accessible pieces that speak across anthropology's subfields: essays on the discipline, teaching contributions, applied and public anthropology, and forum responses. Long specialist research reports fit the AAA's research journals better.