About Informatica

Informatica — the Slovenian journal (ISSN 0350-5596)

Informatica in this record is the international refereed journal published in Ljubljana by the Slovenian Society Informatika (Slovensko društvo INFORMATIKA), with print ISSN 0350-5596 and online ISSN 1854-3871. That identification matters, because the single-word title is shared by several unrelated computing journals in different countries. This profile is anchored to the Slovenian journal's own identifiers and publisher, exactly as shown on this record, and to the journal's official About page hosted in cooperation with the Jožef Stefan Institute. Readers who arrive here looking for a different Informatica — for example the Lithuanian journal of the same name, published in Vilnius with entirely different ISSNs — should follow the ISSNs, not the title alone. If the numbers 0350-5596 and 1854-3871 are not the numbers on the journal you are checking, you are looking at a namesake, and nothing in this profile should be transferred to it.

Identity at a glance

The verified core facts are compact. Title: Informatica. Print ISSN 0350-5596; online ISSN 1854-3871. Publisher: the Slovenian Society Informatika, a non-profit learned and professional society. Base: Ljubljana, Slovenia, with an explicitly European and international outlook. Founded: 1977, with continuous publication since then, according to the journal's official history. Frequency: four quarterly issues a year — Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter — in print and online, supplemented by online-only issues when enough accepted papers have been finalised. Language: the journal became fully international with Volume 17, publishing papers in English. Access: the online edition provides free, immediate open access to content, including the content of the print issues, with articles available online upon publication. A current article-processing charge, a current impact factor and a current CiteScore are not stated in the official material consulted for this profile, so none is quoted here; where a figure is not publicly disclosed by the journal itself, this profile says so rather than borrowing a number from a namesake journal or from an unofficial aggregator.

History and the society behind the journal

Informatica was established in 1977 and was originally published by the Jožef Stefan Institute in Ljubljana, Slovenia's leading research institute. That origin explains the journal's long-standing closeness to the Slovenian research system: the official site is still hosted in the institute's web space, and the institute remains one of the cooperating institutions named by the journal. Beginning with Volume 17, the journal became fully international, publishing in English — a decisive step that moved it from a largely national outlet to a venue read and cited well beyond Slovenia. The publisher of record today is the Slovenian Society Informatika (SSI). The society's own account, reproduced on the journal site, says SSI is a non-profit professional association connecting experts across information technology and informatics in industry, universities and public administration; it was founded in 1972, following an IFIP congress held in Ljubljana; it has around 300 members; and it publishes both a professional magazine, Uporabna informatika, and the scientific journal Informatica. SSI also serves as Slovenia's member society in IFIP, the International Federation for Information Processing. The journal is financially supported by the Slovenian Research Agency through the national call for co-financing of scientific periodical publications — public, non-commercial support that fits the society-publishing model and that the journal states does not direct editorial decisions.

Scope: what Informatica publishes

The official About page describes an international refereed journal that publishes papers addressing all issues of interest to computer and informatics professionals and cognitive scientists — from scientific and technical questions to educational, commercial and industrial ones. In contemporary terms, its territory covers computer science and informatics broadly: algorithms and theoretical foundations, software and information systems, artificial intelligence and cognitive science, data and knowledge work, computing in education, and the practical achievements and innovations of the computer and information industry. The journal also publishes critical examinations of existing publications, news about major practical achievements, and conference announcements and reports, which gives it a partly community-facing character unusual among purely research journals. The current About page lists the contribution types it handles: research or regular articles reporting original scientific results; technical papers reporting novel research or technical advances; overview and survey papers synthesising a sub-area of computing; position papers presenting well-argued scientific perspectives; and, where appropriate, short PhD thesis summaries and student papers. A manuscript that is a pure product announcement, a tutorial with no new contribution, or a paper in an unrelated discipline does not fit that list, however strong it may be on its own terms.

Peer review and editorial standards

The journal's long-standing description of its review model is unusually specific, and authors should plan around it. Papers are accepted on the strength of review by at least two referees from outside the author's country — an international-review rule designed to keep assessment independent of local networks in a small national research system. A fast preview acts as the initial step, and the final step is review by the executive editors to confirm quality before publication. The journal states an acceptance rate of roughly 30 percent in its classic description, and a typical interval of one month to half a year between receipt of the final, correctly formatted version and publication. Treat both figures as the journal's own general guidance rather than as guarantees for any individual paper: review times vary with referee availability and revision rounds. The journal participates in Crossref Similarity Check, powered by iThenticate, and submitted manuscripts are screened for textual similarity as part of the editorial workflow, with the reports evaluated by editors. Its published policies also cover corrections, retractions and expressions of concern, and state that the journal does not publish advertising and does not use unsolicited bulk email or third-party marketing agencies to solicit manuscripts — two concrete signals readers can use when distinguishing the genuine journal from imitation outlets that trade on similar names.

Partnerships and community links

Informatica is published by the Slovenian Society Informatika in cooperation with the Slovenian Research Agency and the Jožef Stefan Institute, and the journal lists links with a broad circle of professional and scientific communities. Among those named on its official pages are ACM Slovenia, the Slovenian Society for Pattern Recognition, the Slovenian Artificial Intelligence Society, the Slovenian Society for Cognitive Science, the Slovenian Society of Mathematicians, Physicists and Astronomers, the Automatic Control Society of Slovenia, the Slovenian Academy of Engineering, and IFIP internationally. That network maps neatly onto the journal's scope: pattern recognition and artificial intelligence on one side, cognitive science in the middle, and mathematics, control and engineering practice on the other. For readers, the practical meaning is that the journal sits inside Slovenia's organised computing community rather than operating as a stand-alone commercial title; its special content, conference reporting and community news flow from those relationships. For authors, the same network is a realistic picture of the journal's first readership — Central and Eastern European computing researchers, plus the wider international audience that the English-language, open-access online edition reaches.

Indexing, metrics and how to read them honestly

Secondary bibliometric sources that track the Slovenian journal under its ISSNs report a long Scopus coverage history beginning in the mid-1990s and an h-index in the low forties in recent snapshots. Those snapshots differ between aggregators and between years, and aggregators occasionally mix this journal's data with its Lithuanian namesake, whose metrics are substantially different. For that reason this profile deliberately does not print a single headline impact factor, CiteScore or quartile as if it were a permanent property of the journal. The honest way to check the journal's current standing is to search Scopus, SCImago or the Web of Science Master Journal List by ISSN 0350-5596 — never by the title Informatica alone — and to note the year of the metric you find. A quartile quoted without a category and a year, or a metric attached to the wrong ISSN, is worse than no metric at all. What can be said without qualification is that the journal has a publication history stretching back to 1977, an international referee model, society ownership, public research-agency support and free online access — the structural features that, in practice, matter more to most authors than a decimal point in a single year's citation table.

Who should consider submitting, and who should not

Informatica is a plausible home for a computer science or informatics paper that is solid, clearly written and of interest beyond a single institution or country: an algorithmic result with a proper evaluation, a software or systems contribution that others can build on, an artificial intelligence or pattern recognition study, a cognitive science paper with a computing connection, a survey that genuinely organises a sub-field, or a well-argued position paper. The international-referee rule rewards papers written for an international reader from the first page — context that a Slovenian or Central European reader might take for granted needs to be spelled out, and related work should not stop at national literature. Authors should not submit here if the paper is primarily a local implementation report with no transferable lesson, if it belongs to a field outside computing and informatics, or if it has already been shaped for the Lithuanian Informatica or another namesake and simply needs a new address: the journals are distinct, their editorial offices are distinct, and a submission sent to the wrong one wastes everyone's time. Checking the ISSN on the submission portal against 0350-5596 and 1854-3871 is a ten-second safeguard against that exact mistake.

Preparing a manuscript

The journal directs authors to its Aims and Scope and Guide for Authors for article categories, length limits and submission requirements, and those documents — not this profile — are the controlling source on format. Three practical points follow from the journal's stated model. First, write in clear English and consider professional language checking before submission; the journal itself strongly recommends careful language preparation, with final human revision, because presentation quality is part of how referees judge a paper. Second, expect the similarity screen: quote and cite sources precisely, and do not recycle text from your own earlier papers without clear attribution. Third, build the paper for the two-referee international process — a self-contained introduction, a reproducible method, results that a reader in another country can verify from what is on the page, and honest limitations. Because regular issues run to roughly 150 A4 pages and appear quarterly, with online-only issues in between, accepted papers move into a real production queue; supplying the final version in the correct form, as the journal requests, is what starts the one-to-six-month publication interval the journal describes.

Reading and using the journal as a researcher

For readers, Informatica is best used as a long-run record of European computing research with a Slovenian centre of gravity. Its archive reaches back to 1977, and the online edition is freely accessible, so older work — including material from the period when the journal completed its transition to English with Volume 17 — can be read without a subscription barrier. When citing it, give the journal title as Informatica with the place or ISSN where ambiguity is possible; bibliographic databases distinguish the Slovenian and Lithuanian titles by ISSN, and a citation that carries 0350-5596 is unambiguous in a way that the bare title is not. Teachers will find the survey and position papers, and the journal's coverage of computing education, useful entry points for students. Practitioners will find the technical papers and the journal's reporting of practical achievements and industry innovations closer to their concerns than a purely theoretical outlet would be. In every case, verify the individual article on the journal's own site: aggregator pages about Informatica are a known site of crossed wires between namesakes.

Fees, access and publishing model

The journal's model is society publishing with public support. The online edition is free and immediate to read, and the journal is co-financed through the Slovenian Research Agency's call for scientific periodical publications. The official material consulted for this profile does not publish a current article-processing charge schedule, so no fee figure is quoted here; an author who needs certainty on any charge, waiver or print subscription price should obtain it from the editorial office or the journal's current author pages before submitting, rather than from a third-party listing, several of which describe other journals entirely. The journal states that it does not publish advertising and does not accept advertising as part of its operations, and that editorial decisions are independent of financial support and based solely on scholarly merit. Those policy statements, published by the journal itself, are part of the verified record of how it operates.

Informatica in the Slovenian and Central European research landscape

To understand why a journal founded in Ljubljana in 1977 still matters, it helps to place it in the research system that produced it. Slovenia is a small country with a disproportionately strong computing tradition, anchored by the Jožef Stefan Institute, the University of Ljubljana and a cluster of institutes and technology firms that grew up around them. A national journal in such a system faces a choice: remain a local bulletin in the national language, or internationalise deliberately and compete for authors and readers abroad. Informatica's own history records the second choice — the move to fully international, English-language publication with Volume 17 — and its review rule, requiring referees from outside the author's country, is the editorial expression of the same decision. The result is a journal whose author base and readership extend well beyond Slovenia while its ownership, funding and community links remain Slovenian. For bibliometric purposes that combination is important: the journal's record is long, continuous and society-held, which makes its archive unusually stable compared with journals that have changed commercial publishers several times. For authors from Central, Eastern and Southern Europe in particular, it offers something specific — a venue whose editors understand the research conditions of smaller European systems, but whose standards, language and review pool are international. That positioning, rather than any single year's citation figure, is the journal's durable claim on an author's attention, and it is the reason this profile treats its history and governance in such detail.

Article types in practice

The categories on the journal's About page translate into distinct expectations. A research article must carry an original result and enough method for others to judge it. A technical paper is judged on the novelty and usefulness of the advance it reports, which suits software, systems and engineering contributions that may not present themselves as theorems. A survey is expected to synthesise a sub-area, not merely list it: the value lies in the organisation, comparison and judgement the author adds. A position paper must argue, openly and with evidence, for a scientific perspective others may contest. PhD thesis summaries and student papers, where the journal accepts them, are short formats with their own limits, and the journal's Guide for Authors is the controlling document for category rules and length. Choosing the right category at submission is not a formality: referees assess the paper against the promise its category makes, and a survey judged as a research article, or a technical report dressed as a research paper, starts the review at a disadvantage.

Frequently asked questions

Is this the same journal as Informatica published in Lithuania? No. Same title, different journal, different publisher, different ISSNs. This record, ISSN 0350-5596 and 1854-3871, is the Slovenian journal published by the Slovenian Society Informatika in Ljubljana. How often does it appear? Four quarterly issues a year, in print and online, plus online-only issues in between when enough accepted papers are ready. Is it peer reviewed? Yes — an international refereed journal, with at least two referees from outside the author's country under its stated model, an initial fast preview and a final executive-editor review. What is the acceptance rate? The journal's classic description says roughly 30 percent; treat that as guidance, not a promise. Is it open access? The online edition is free and immediate to read, including print-issue content. What are its current impact factor and quartile? They are not stated in the official material consulted here and are not quoted, because aggregator figures for this title are frequently confused with its namesake; check Scopus or SCImago by ISSN for the current year. Where do I submit? Through the journal's official website, after confirming the ISSNs shown there match this record.

Verification notes

This profile was built from the journal's official About and policy pages and from bibliographic records keyed to its ISSNs. Two cautions emerged during verification and are recorded for transparency. First, a second record on this site, titled Informatica (Slovenia), carries the same two ISSNs and the same Slovenian publisher and is a thin possible duplicate of this record; it is reported as a pair for the site's duplicate handling, and this profile has been published on the present record as instructed. Second, several metric aggregators present figures for the Lithuanian Informatica alongside, or instead of, the Slovenian journal's figures; no such figure has been imported into this profile. Facts that could not be verified from an official source — a current article-processing charge and current-year citation metrics — are described above as not publicly disclosed in the material consulted, rather than being filled in from secondary listings.