Humanities

About Humanities

Humanities — An MDPI Open Access Journal: Full Profile

Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787) is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal published by MDPI, the Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, based in Basel, Switzerland. It was launched at the beginning of the 2010s, when MDPI — until then known mainly for science, medicine and technology titles — set out to become a genuinely multidisciplinary publisher. The first paper of its inaugural issue was published on 16 September 2011, in an editorial by publisher Shu-Kun Lin explaining why a house built on scientific journals was starting a humanities title alongside new social-science journals such as Societies, Religions, Administrative Sciences and Behavioral Sciences. Volume 1 followed in 2012, and the journal has grown since then from a small quarterly experiment into a monthly online journal with a wide international authorship.

The journal's identity rests on one organising idea: narrative. As MDPI states in its aims, Humanities focuses on the meaning of cultural expression and perceptions of human existence as seen through different interpretative lenses, and its core question is how human cultures tell their stories — in writing, speech, art, architecture, music, dance and other forms that carry a human story. That narrative framing is what separates this very broad title from a generalist dumping ground. A paper on a building, a song, a ritual or a novel belongs here when its argument is about how the object expresses, preserves or contests meaning, and when it engages critically and in depth with the recent scholarly literature on its subject.

At a Glance

Aims and Scope in Detail

MDPI's own statement says the journal provides an advanced forum for studies related to the humanities and welcomes a variety of perspectives, including interdisciplinary approaches, as long as they focus on narrative modes of human experience. It publishes research drawing on archival, documentary, oral, material, visual and other narrative sources, and it imposes no restriction on maximum paper length — an unusual and deliberate choice in a field where arguments often need room for close reading, extended quotation, images or documentary appendices. In return, the journal expects each paper to critically engage with the relevant and most recent secondary literature and to represent the state of the art in its field, theoretically and practically. It also states explicitly that it pursues no political or religious ideology and aims for the highest level of objectivity.

The subject areas listed by the journal are: human behaviour; cultural studies; visual culture; gender, race and diversity; human history; literature; music and the arts; philosophical perspectives; and transdisciplinary humanities. In practice that means the journal can accommodate, in a single volume year, a literary study of a contemporary novelist, a historical reconstruction from archival records, a philosophical argument about narrative identity, an analysis of visual culture, and a study of how communities remember, perform or contest their past. The common thread an editor will look for is not the discipline label on the author's department, but the narrative and interpretative centre of the argument.

Journal Cluster and Place Within MDPI

MDPI groups Humanities in a cluster it calls Human Thought and Cultural Expression, together with titles devoted to culture, histories, languages and literature, and religions. That grouping is useful guidance for authors choosing between MDPI titles: a paper centred on a religious tradition may fit the religions title better, a primarily linguistic paper may belong with the languages title, and a work of straight political science or economics will usually belong elsewhere entirely. Humanities is the cluster's broad, narrative-centred home — the place for work that crosses those boundaries or that treats cultural expression itself as the object of study.

Article Types and Special Issues

The journal publishes research articles and reviews, and a large part of its output is organised through Special Issues on particular subjects, each led by guest editors. Special Issues are a defining feature of the MDPI model and authors should understand both their advantages and their demands. A well-chosen Special Issue gives a paper immediate context, neighbouring papers on related questions, and a guest editor with a specific interest in the topic. At the same time, authors should check the issue's stated theme, deadline and guest-editor team carefully, submit only work that genuinely fits the theme, and expect the same peer-review process as for regular papers. The journal also lists books received for potential review and welcomes review copies from authors and publishers at MDPI's Basel address, reflecting the continuing importance of the scholarly book review in humanities disciplines.

Peer Review, Ethics and Editorial Standards

MDPI states that manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-anonymised peer-review process, in which authors and reviewers do not know each other's identities. MDPI is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), and its publication ethics statement for this journal commits the publisher to rigorous peer review together with strict ethical policies, with a stated zero-tolerance approach to plagiarism, data falsification and inappropriate authorship credit. Submissions are screened with iThenticate software against previous publications to verify originality. Authors should prepare manuscripts accordingly: quote and cite sources precisely, secure permissions for images and long extracts where required, disclose any relevant interests, and make sure that archival or oral-history material is used in line with the ethical expectations of their own institution and discipline, including consent where human participants or interviewees are involved.

Speed is part of the journal's offer and should be interpreted honestly. MDPI reports, for papers published in the first half of 2026, a median time to first decision of approximately 34.6 days after submission and a median of 4.6 days from acceptance to publication. Those are publisher-reported medians for this journal, not guarantees for any individual manuscript, and humanities authors used to year-long review cycles should still allow for revision rounds, guest-editor schedules for Special Issues, and the time needed to respond properly to reviewers. A fast first decision can also be a rejection, so authors should read the decision letter carefully rather than treating speed itself as a quality signal.

Open Access, Charges and Copyright

All articles in Humanities are open access, distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution licence (CC BY), with copyright retained by the authors. Readers anywhere can read, download and reuse the work with proper attribution, which matters in humanities fields where many readers — independent scholars, teachers, museum and archive professionals, and colleagues at institutions with small library budgets — sit outside large university subscription systems. The cost of that openness is carried by an article processing charge, stated as 1,400 Swiss francs on the journal pages consulted for this profile. Authors should confirm the current charge on the journal site before submitting, check whether their institution has an MDPI agreement or a humanities funding route that covers such charges, and note MDPI's reviewer-recognition scheme, under which timely, thorough reviewers receive vouchers toward the charge on a future MDPI publication. Waiver and discount policies change over time, so any author for whom the charge is a barrier should ask the editorial office directly rather than assuming either that help exists or that it does not.

Indexing, Metrics and How to Judge Them

MDPI states that Humanities is indexed within Scopus, the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) in Web of Science, ERIH Plus — the European reference index for the humanities — and other databases. For humanities scholars, that combination has a specific practical meaning. Scopus and ESCI visibility helps work be found and counted in institutional reporting systems that were designed largely around the sciences. ERIH Plus signals recognition within European humanities infrastructure, where book-based and nationally published scholarship has historically been under-counted by citation databases. The journal homepage displays a Journal Impact Factor of 0.3 for 2025. In the humanities, where citation is slow, books matter, and many influential works are written in languages other than English, a low numerical factor is common across respectable journals and should never be used alone to judge a venue. Authors should weigh fit, readership, review quality, indexing relevant to their own institution's rules, and the journal's record of publishing work they admire, well ahead of any single metric.

Prospective authors should also verify indexing claims at the source that matters to them — for example, checking the Scopus source list or their institution's recognised list — before submitting, because database coverage can start, pause or end, and because a general statement on a publisher page is not a substitute for the list an appointments or funding committee will actually consult.

Who Publishes Here, and What Succeeds

The journal serves literary scholars, historians, philosophers, cultural-studies researchers, art and music scholars, and interdisciplinary researchers whose work centres on narrative and interpretation. Work that succeeds tends to share four traits. It states a clear interpretative claim early, rather than merely describing a text, object or event. It shows command of the recent literature — the journal's insistence on engagement with the most recent secondary literature is repeated in its aims for a reason. It handles its sources, whether archival documents, oral accounts, images or performances, with explicit method, so a reader from a neighbouring discipline can follow the reasoning. And it writes for an international, cross-disciplinary reader: specialist terms are explained, local context is supplied, and quotations in other languages are translated or glossed where the argument depends on them.

Conversely, purely descriptive summaries, undergraduate-style surveys, opinion pieces without scholarly apparatus, and papers whose real subject is empirical social science, natural science or professional practice without a narrative and cultural centre are poor fits, however competent they may be in their own fields. Authors with such work will save time by choosing a disciplinary journal instead.

How to Submit

Manuscripts are submitted online through MDPI's submission system after registering and logging in on the MDPI website. Before submitting, authors should read the journal's Instructions for Authors page in full, prepare the manuscript in the journal's format, anonymise it for double-anonymised review, and have ready a cover note that explains the paper's narrative focus and its contribution to the literature. For a Special Issue, note the issue title and deadline and consider contacting the guest editors with a title and a short abstract — MDPI Special Issue pages commonly invite an abstract of about 250 words for preliminary assessment, though that step does not replace full peer review of the completed manuscript. Submitted manuscripts must not have been published previously and must not be under consideration elsewhere, conference-proceedings papers excepted as stated by the publisher. Good English is expected; MDPI offers an English editing service that authors may use before submission or during revision, at their own judgement and cost.

Structured-Field Notes and Conflicts

The Journals World record for this post lists ISSNs 20760787 and 26371901 and the publisher as Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute. The first ISSN matches MDPI's own statement exactly: every official journal page consulted gives Humanities as ISSN 2076-0787. The second number, 2637-1901, could not be verified as an ISSN of this MDPI journal from the official MDPI pages consulted, and readers should rely on 2076-0787 for citation and library purposes unless a catalogue record they trust assigns the second number to a specific edition. No conflict was found on publisher or country: MDPI is headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, which matches the Swiss origin shown in independent journal listings.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Humanities a real, peer-reviewed journal?
Yes. It is an MDPI open access journal, published since its inaugural issue in 2011–2012, with double-anonymised peer review and indexing stated by the publisher in Scopus, ESCI and ERIH Plus.

What ISSN should I cite?
2076-0787. That is the ISSN given on MDPI's official journal pages.

How much does it cost to publish?
The article processing charge stated on the journal pages consulted is 1,400 CHF. Always confirm the current charge and any institutional agreement before submitting.

How fast is review?
MDPI reports a median first decision of about 34.6 days and acceptance-to-publication of about 4.6 days for papers published in the first half of 2026. Individual manuscripts will vary.

What kinds of papers fit best?
Interpretative, narrative-centred work in literature, history, philosophy, cultural and visual studies, music and the arts, and transdisciplinary humanities, engaging critically with recent scholarship.

Can I publish in a Special Issue?
Yes, where your work genuinely fits the announced theme. Check the issue page for guest editors and deadlines, and expect full peer review.

Verdict

Humanities is a broad, narrative-centred, fully open access home for interpretative scholarship, with the speed and Special Issue structure characteristic of MDPI and the visibility that comes from Scopus, ESCI and ERIH Plus indexing. It will not replace disciplinary journals for highly specialised debates, and its article charge must be planned for, but for humanities work that speaks across disciplinary boundaries and needs to be readable by anyone, anywhere, without a subscription, it is a legitimate and increasingly established choice — provided the paper's heart is a story about human culture and what that story means.

Reputation, Criticism and How to Decide for Yourself

Any profile of an MDPI journal should address, plainly, the debate that surrounds the publisher's model, because authors will hear it from colleagues. MDPI's rapid growth, heavy use of Special Issues and fast editorial timelines have attracted criticism from some scholars, who worry about uneven guest-editing and about volume growing faster than quality control. MDPI in turn points to its COPE membership, its screening tools, its anonymised review and the indexing its journals hold in systems that apply their own inclusion criteria. A responsible author does not have to settle that general argument in order to make a good decision about this journal. The practical test is local and checkable. Read a recent regular issue and a recent Special Issue in your own area and judge the scholarship as you would in any journal. Check whether scholars you respect publish and guest-edit there. Confirm the journal's presence on the database lists your own institution actually uses. Ask colleagues in your field who have reviewed for the journal about the quality of the process they took part in. If those checks satisfy you, the general debate should not override your own evidence; if they do not, no indexing statement in this profile should persuade you otherwise.

What a Good Submission Looks Like, Step by Step

Begin with fit. Write one sentence that states your paper's narrative centre — the story, text, practice, image or memory your argument interprets — and test it against the journal's stated aims. If the sentence could sit equally well in a sociology or a management journal without changing a word, the paper probably belongs elsewhere. Next, build the literature conversation honestly: the journal expects engagement with the most recent secondary literature, so a bibliography that stops a decade ago is a warning sign to repair before submission, not after review. Then make your method visible. Humanities papers are sometimes criticised, unfairly, for hiding their method; a short passage explaining your sources, your selection of them and your interpretative approach will help reviewers from neighbouring disciplines follow you. Prepare the manuscript for anonymised review, check every quotation against its source, clear image permissions early rather than after acceptance, and translate quotations where the argument turns on wording. Finally, choose deliberately between a regular submission and a Special Issue: a regular submission gives your paper the journal's general readership, while a well-matched Special Issue gives it immediate intellectual company. Either route leads to the same review, so choose by fit and timing, not by any imagined difference in rigour.

After acceptance, use the open licence well. Deposit the published version, with its DOI, in your institutional repository record, link it from your profile pages, and, where your discipline welcomes it, write a short public summary that leads non-specialist readers to the article. Open access only fulfils its promise when authors help the work travel beyond the journal's own site.