Historische Zeitschrift

About Historische Zeitschrift

Overview of Historische Zeitschrift

The Historische Zeitschrift (abbreviated Hist. Z. or HZ) is the flagship German-language journal of historical scholarship. Founded in 1859 by Heinrich von Sybel, it was the first scholarly history journal of its kind and, for a time, the foremost historical journal in Europe — a position its longevity still reflects: the publisher's archive now runs past volume 320. It is published by De Gruyter (Walter de Gruyter GmbH) through the Oldenbourg scholarly imprint, appears six times a year, and carries print ISSN 0018-2613 and electronic ISSN 2196-680X. Its essay section treats subjects from every area and every epoch of history with, in the publisher's words, no regional or epochal focus; around the essays sits one of the most extensive book-review apparatuses in the discipline — a detailed review section, review essays on current trends and debates, and a list of publications submitted for review that together keep readers current with German and international historical research.

That combination — open scope, exceptional age, and a review section treated as a core scholarly service rather than filler — explains the journal's standing. The Historische Zeitschrift is where German-language historiography has argued with itself for more than a century and a half: founded by Sybel in the century of professionalisation, continued in the twentieth century by Friedrich Meinecke and Theodor Schieder, and edited in recent decades by Lothar Gall before passing to its current editors-in-chief. A directory figure for its impact needs context, and this profile supplies it: the publisher displays a 2024 Journal Impact Factor of 0.1 and a CiteScore of 0.3, numbers typical of a German-language humanities journal whose citations accumulate slowly over decades, while OpenAlex counts an h-index of 53 across the journal's full backfile. None of those figures, alone, describes what the journal is. It is a generalist journal of record for an entire national scholarly tradition that also publishes international work in German, and its review coverage makes even a non-subscribing historian a regular reader of its tables of contents.

Identity, Publisher and Bibliographic Record

The journal's bibliographic record is stable and should be quoted exactly. Title: Historische Zeitschrift. Standard abbreviation: Hist. Z. Print ISSN: 0018-2613. Electronic ISSN: 2196-680X. Language: German. Frequency: six issues per year. Publisher: De Gruyter, with the journal historically issued by Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag in Munich and now carried on the De Gruyter Brill platform following the combination of the two houses' scholarly lists. The editorial office sits in two places: the editors-in-chief work from the Historical Seminar of Goethe University Frankfurt (Norbert-Wollheim-Platz 1, 60323 Frankfurt am Main), while the publisher's editorial office for the journal, which also receives review copies, is at Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Neumarkter Strasse 28, 81673 Munich. Supplements to the journal — the Beihefte, containing essays and monographs on topics of German and European history and edited collections on outstanding subject areas — form a companion series under the same editorship.

Two structured-field warnings apply to the Journals World record for this post. The stored publisher value is the bare number "3644", a garbled numeric identifier, not a publisher; the verified publisher is De Gruyter (Oldenbourg imprint). The stored h-index of 19 is a Scopus- and SCImago-based figure; the OpenAlex source record (S162713455, resolved through the ISSN endpoint in October 2026) counts 14,239 works, 18,756 citations and an h-index of 53. The difference is structural, not an error in either source: OpenAlex counts the journal's enormous backfile since 1859, including its thousands of book reviews, whereas Scopus-derived counts rest on the modern indexed coverage window. The stored coverage statement — 1859–1917, 1919–1943, 1950–2025 — itself records the journal's wartime and post-war interruptions and is the correct way to describe its run: publication broke in the final war years and resumed in 1950, and holdings statements for libraries follow exactly those spans.

History and Development

Heinrich von Sybel founded the Historische Zeitschrift in 1859, at the moment when history was becoming a professional, source-critical discipline in the German universities, and the journal embodied that transformation: essays held to evidentiary standards, and systematic reviewing of new scholarship. It became, in the standard reference description, the first and for a time the foremost historical journal in Europe. Its nineteenth-century volumes carried the methodological arguments — over sources, over the writing of national and European pasts — that defined the discipline's self-understanding, and its review section made it the discipline's common noticeboard. In the twentieth century the editorship passed to Friedrich Meinecke and then to Theodor Schieder, names that mark the journal's continuity through the Empire, the Weimar years, the dictatorship period and the early Federal Republic; the coverage gaps in its run (1918, and 1944–1949) map onto Germany's own catastrophes and reconstruction. Publication resumed in 1950 and has continued without interruption since, six issues a year.

The journal's modern institutional history is one of consolidation inside a large scholarly publisher. For decades it appeared under the Oldenbourg name in Munich — R. Oldenbourg Verlag is the host organisation named in its OpenAlex record — and with Oldenbourg's absorption into De Gruyter it moved onto the De Gruyter platform, gaining a complete digital backfile, DOI-based referencing and the metrics displays quoted in this profile. The editorship in recent decades was held by Lothar Gall, whose tenure bridged the print and digital eras, and the current editors-in-chief are Andreas Fahrmeir of Goethe University Frankfurt and Julia Hillner of the University of Bonn. The most recent structural change concerns access rather than content: the current volume is published open access through De Gruyter Brill's Subscribe to Open arrangement, under which, when subscriptions are maintained at the required level, the volume's articles appear under a Creative Commons licence at no cost to authors; the journal's DOAJ record, added in May 2025, documents that arrangement with a CC BY-NC-ND licence and no article processing charges. A journal founded when scholarship travelled by post now gives its current volume away free — while its 1859 backfile sits behind the same platform's subscription archive.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The Historische Zeitschrift is a generalist journal in the strict sense. Its essay section, in the publisher's description, deals with aspects from all areas of history, with no regional or epochal focus: classical studies, medieval history, early modern history, modern history and contemporary history are the keyword set recorded in its DOAJ entry, and the journal welcomes contributions from the entire spectrum of history that treat a broad topic at a high analytical level and in an innovative manner. "Broad topic" is the operative test. The journal does not publish narrowly local or purely antiquarian studies, however sound; a manuscript must address a question whose interest extends beyond its immediate case, and must do so with the source-critical rigour the journal has demanded since 1859. Early-career researchers, especially at postdoctoral level, are expressly welcomed alongside established historians — the publisher states that the journal offers both the widest possible dissemination of their findings — but the analytical bar is the same for everyone.

The review apparatus is the second half of the scope, and it is not secondary. Each issue carries a detailed book-review section covering German and international historical research, review articles that take up current trends and debates across several books at once, and the list of publications submitted for review, which functions as a running bibliography of the field's new monographs. For many readers — including many who never submit — this apparatus is the journal: it is how a specialist in one century keeps sight of the others, and how new books are first noticed, assessed and argued over in German-language historiography. The supplements series extends the same function to longer forms: essays and monographs on German and European history and edited collections on major subject areas appear as Historische Zeitschrift supplements under the journal's editorship. Authors considering the journal should therefore think of it as two venues in one — an essay journal for broad, analytical contributions in German, and the discipline's principal review forum, in which being reviewed is itself a form of arrival.

Editorial Leadership and Peer Review

The editors-in-chief are Andreas Fahrmeir (Goethe University Frankfurt) and Julia Hillner (University of Bonn). They are supported by a board of co-editors named on the publisher's page: Arndt Brendecke, Sabine Dabringhaus, Dominik Geppert, Reinhild Kreis, Birthe Kundrus, Sonke Neitzel, Werner Plumpe, Susanne Rau, Frank Rexroth, Karl Ubl and Uwe Walter — a board whose own specialisms, spanning early modern, modern, economic, military and global history, mirror the journal's generalist remit. The managing editor at the publisher is Dr. Roland Cvetkovski. Submissions of research articles go as PDF files by e-mail to the editors-in-chief at their university addresses, as set out in the publisher's author instructions; reviews, by contrast, are submitted through the journal's own review submission system after registration, a separation of workflows that reflects how differently the two genres are handled.

The review process is documented by the publisher in unusual detail, and this profile reports it as documented. Submitted articles undergo single-blind peer review by at least two editors and external reviewers — the DOAJ record describes the same arrangement as single anonymous peer review. The publisher's fuller account describes three stages: the editors-in-chief first check whether an article meets general scholarly requirements and fits the journal's scope; if it passes, two reviewers are chosen for the peer review; and on the basis of the reviews the editors-in-chief decide on acceptance, rejection, or revision with or without a further round of review, with other board members called on for additional opinions where needed. Reviewer comments reach authors anonymously. Two practical consequences follow from the publisher's own statements: very few articles are accepted without revisions, so authors should budget for a revision round as the normal case; and approximately one in three submitted articles is ultimately published, which makes the Historische Zeitschrift demanding but not a lottery — a well-fitted, broadly framed manuscript in strong German has a real prospect. Submissions may be checked for plagiarism, and manuscripts must not be under consideration elsewhere at the same time.

Access Model, Licensing and Charges

Historically the Historische Zeitschrift was a subscription journal, and its deep backfile remains part of De Gruyter's subscription archive, which now, under the publisher's current policy, gives subscribers access to every issue from volume 1 onward. The current volume, however, is published open access under the Subscribe to Open model described above: accepted articles appear under a Creative Commons licence at no cost to authors, funded by the continuation of library subscriptions rather than by author-side charges. The journal's DOAJ record — created in May 2025 under both ISSNs — records the licence as CC BY-NC-ND, records that authors do not retain copyright in the DOAJ rights field, and records that no article processing charge is levied. Authors should read the current volume's licence terms on the publisher's page at the moment of acceptance, because Subscribe to Open arrangements are renewed volume by volume and the applicable Creative Commons variant is a term of the individual publication agreement.

What this model means in practice: readers without a subscription can read the current volume free and lawfully reuse it within the licence terms, while readers needing an essay from, say, 1911 or 1975 will normally reach it through a library subscription or the platform's other access routes. There is no author fee in either direction — the journal neither charges to publish nor, under S2O, depends on those who publish in it for its revenue. For evaluators and librarians, the salient catalogue facts are the two ISSNs, the six-issues-a-year frequency, the German language, and the interrupted run (1859–1917, 1919–1943, 1950–present) that any holdings statement must reproduce exactly.

Indexing, Metrics and Standing

The publisher displays the journal's 2024 metrics, sourced to the 2025 editions of the underlying services: Journal Impact Factor 0.1 and five-year Impact Factor 0.2 with a Journal Citation Indicator of 0.51 (Journal Citation Reports, Clarivate); CiteScore 0.3 (Scopus); SCImago Journal Rank 0.175 (SJR, from Scopus data); and Source Normalized Impact per Paper 0.891 (CWTS). Directory summaries place the journal in the third quartile (Q3) for History in Scopus-based rankings. These figures, quoted exactly as the publisher attributes them, describe a citation economy typical of German-language history: books matter more than articles, citations accrue over decades rather than years, and a two-year impact window captures almost nothing of how the journal is actually used. The SNIP figure close to 0.9 — which normalises for the citation behaviour of the field — is the more informative of the small numbers.

The long view tells the fuller story. OpenAlex, resolved through the ISSN endpoint for 0018-2613 in October 2026, records 14,239 works and 18,756 citations for the journal with an h-index of 53 — a corpus that includes its nineteenth- and twentieth-century essays and reviews. Set beside the stored directory h-index of 19, the gap illustrates why single-number summaries mislead for a journal of this age: the number you get depends on which centuries the database in question actually covers. The journal's standing does not in truth rest on any of these figures. It rests on 165 years of continuous disciplinary presence, on an editorship drawn from leading German universities, and on the fact that its review section remains a primary instrument through which German-language historiography notices itself. Authors choosing it choose scrutiny, a German-reading international audience, and a permanent place in the discipline's main archive — and should weigh those against the slower citation returns that German-language humanities publishing generally yields.

Publishing in the Journal: Guidance for Authors

The publisher's instructions are precise, and this profile summarises them without replacing them. Contributions must be in German: the journal is open to contributions in German from the entire spectrum of history, and while foreign-language articles can be sent for review, authors must provide the German translation if the article is accepted — a rule that makes a strong German text, or a budget for translation, a practical precondition of submission. Research articles should not exceed 80,000 characters including spaces. Each submission needs an abstract of 1,000 to 1,500 characters including spaces, in both German and English, which states the article's content, theses, methods and results, plus three to five not-too-specific keywords in German and English to aid discoverability. Spelling follows the new German orthography as codified by Duden, and the formal design follows the journal's Instructions for Authors. Manuscripts are submitted as PDF by e-mail to the editors-in-chief; they must not be under consideration at another journal simultaneously.

Strategically, three pieces of guidance matter most. First, fit is decided early — the editors-in-chief screen for scope and general scholarly quality before any reviewer sees a manuscript — so the framing pages carry unusual weight: make the broad question, the analytical contribution and the innovation explicit at the start, in the abstract as much as in the introduction. Second, expect revision: since very few articles pass without it, a manuscript submitted at the very limit of the character count leaves no room to answer reviewers, and a submission timed against a fixed deadline should allow for the revision round the publisher describes as normal. Third, engage the journal itself: a submission that shows awareness of the debates carried in recent HZ review essays and essays positions itself inside the conversation the journal exists to host. Reviewers of books follow a separate path — registration in the journal's review submission system, submission of the review text through that system, and the review section's own conventions, including the rule that the review section carries no footnotes, only short bracketed references in the text.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Historische Zeitschrift?
Print ISSN 0018-2613 and electronic ISSN 2196-680X.

Who publishes the journal, and when was it founded?
De Gruyter (Walter de Gruyter GmbH), through the Oldenbourg imprint. Heinrich von Sybel founded the journal in 1859. The numeric publisher value stored in some directory records is a garbled identifier, not a publisher name.

Who are the current editors-in-chief?
Andreas Fahrmeir (Goethe University Frankfurt) and Julia Hillner (University of Bonn). Lothar Gall is the former editor-in-chief; Friedrich Meinecke and Theodor Schieder continued the journal in the twentieth century.

What language does the journal publish in, and how often does it appear?
German, six issues per year. Foreign-language manuscripts can be reviewed, but accepted articles must be provided in German translation by the author.

How does peer review work, and what are the chances of acceptance?
Single-blind review by at least two editors and external reviewers, in three stages ending in an editors-in-chief decision. The publisher states that very few articles are accepted without revision and that approximately one in three submitted articles is published.

Is the journal open access? Does it charge authors?
The current volume is open access under the Subscribe to Open model, with articles under a Creative Commons licence (recorded in DOAJ as CC BY-NC-ND) and no article processing charges. The deep backfile is part of the publisher's subscription archive.

What are its metrics?
As displayed by the publisher for 2024: Impact Factor 0.1, CiteScore 0.3, SJR 0.175, SNIP 0.891. OpenAlex counts 14,239 works and an h-index of 53 across the full backfile — figures from different databases and coverage windows that should always be quoted with their source.