International Insolvency Review

About International Insolvency Review

International Insolvency Review: The Specialist Journal of Cross-Border Insolvency Law

International Insolvency Review (ISO 4 abbreviation Int. Insolv. Rev.) is a refereed law journal devoted to insolvency, restructuring and debtor–creditor relations seen from an international and comparative perspective. It is published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of INSOL International, the International Association of Restructuring, Insolvency & Bankruptcy Professionals, and the copyright line on the publisher's journal page reads “© INSOL International and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.” The journal's own statement of purpose, reproduced by INSOL, is to provide authoritative information and comment about major issues and developments in the field of insolvency, viewed in an international perspective, and to serve both as a medium for disseminating news of recent or impending developments in insolvency law and practice and as an archival source for the related documentation. Few law journals are built so completely around a single problem: what happens, legally and practically, when a debtor's assets, creditors, business or life are spread across more than one jurisdiction, and the insolvency systems of those jurisdictions do not match.

That problem has only grown since the journal's coverage begins in 1990. Global supply chains, multinational enterprise groups, cross-border lending and digital assets mean that a single corporate failure can trigger proceedings in several countries at once, raising questions about which court should lead, whether foreign proceedings should be recognised, how office-holders in different states should cooperate, and how creditors in one country fare under the distribution rules of another. The Review exists for the scholars, judges, practitioners, legislators and regulators who work on exactly those questions. This profile sets out the journal's verified identity and identifiers, its history and editorial model, the subjects it covers, its indexing and measured citation record, and practical guidance for authors deciding whether their work belongs in its pages.

At a Glance

Identity and Identifiers — and a Correction to This Record

The two ISSNs anchor the journal's identity across every database consulted. Wiley's journal page gives the Online ISSN as 1099-1107 and the Print ISSN as 1180-0518, and the same pair appears in the OpenAlex source record and in the record previously held on this site. Authors citing the journal should use the online ISSN for the digital edition and the print ISSN for the paper edition, and should not confuse this title with domestic insolvency journals of similar name, such as Australia's Insolvency Law Journal, which is a different publication from a different publisher.

One structured field in the older version of this Journals World record was wrong, and it is corrected here in the text: the publisher field contained only the bare number “60”, which is a garbled numeric value and not a publisher at all. The correct publisher, verified on Wiley's own journal page, is John Wiley & Sons Ltd, publishing on behalf of INSOL International. The older record also described the journal's focus simply as “Q4”. A quartile is a ranking outcome, not a subject: the journal's actual fields are insolvency law, restructuring, comparative and cross-border insolvency, and related areas of finance and commercial law, as the scope discussion below shows. Quartile figures reported by aggregators also disagree with each other — one Scopus-based summary reports an overall Q4 with an SJR of 0.142, while another reports the journal's best quartile as Q3 in Law and Q4 in Finance — which is precisely why a single quartile letter should never be presented as the journal's subject or as a permanent property of the title.

History and Editorial Character

The coverage record for the journal begins in 1990, with a short gap in 1992 in the Scopus-derived listing (1990–1991, then 1993 onwards). The founding conception, as INSOL's description preserves it, was already fully formed: a refereed journal appearing three times a year, in which every item is subjected to rigorous evaluation by the Editor working in conjunction with the Editorial Board. That board was described as some twenty members, each a distinguished academic, judge or practitioner with an established international reputation in insolvency, with particular emphasis on its cross-border and comparative dimensions. The composition matters for authors. A board drawn from the academy, the judiciary and practice, across multiple jurisdictions, is structured to judge work the way the field itself works — comparatively, and with an eye to whether an argument travels beyond the legal system in which it was written.

The journal is the scholarly voice of INSOL International, the worldwide federation of insolvency and restructuring professionals, and that relationship shapes its contents. Alongside full scholarly articles providing authoritative treatment of topics of current interest, an issue may carry case comments that work through the implications of a recent decision, book reviews and notices, special communications, and what the founding description calls editorial intelligence regarding significant developments — short, timely reporting of reforms, cases and initiatives that practitioners need to know about before the scholarship catches up. Guest editorials in the journal have, for example, showcased the work of the next generation of insolvency researchers supported by INSOL International and INSOL Europe, which illustrates the journal's role as a bridge between the professional federation, its academic group and the wider research community.

Wiley's current journal page names Paul J Omar as editor. Board membership turns over in the normal way: the journal announced a cohort of retirements effective 31 December 2021, thanking long-serving members drawn from universities, courts and firms across Europe, North America, South Africa and Australia, and welcomed eight new members from 1 January 2022, including specialists associated with the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the Brazilian judiciary, UNCITRAL's former insolvency leadership, and universities and practices in Italy, Finland, Australia, Romania and India. For a prospective author, that turnover record is useful evidence in itself: it shows an actively maintained international board rather than a static masthead, and it indicates the breadth of jurisdictions from which informed reviewers can be drawn.

Scope: What the Journal Publishes

The organising idea of the journal is insolvency viewed internationally. Two connotations of the title run through its pages. The first is informational: developments in insolvency law and practice anywhere in the world may be of international interest, because reform in one jurisdiction is watched, borrowed from and reacted to in others. The second is structural: many insolvencies contain a genuinely cross-border element, because creditors or assets are dispersed between jurisdictions, or because the debtor's affairs, or the legal structure of a transaction, generate multi-jurisdictional questions. Work that engages either connotation is in scope; purely domestic doctrinal work with no comparative or international dimension is a harder fit.

Within that frame, recurring subject territory includes:

• Cross-border insolvency frameworks — recognition and relief, cooperation and communication between courts and office-holders, protocols in multinational cases, and the operation of instruments such as the UNCITRAL Model Law on Cross-Border Insolvency and the recast EU Insolvency Regulation, including its provisions on groups of companies.
• Enterprise group insolvency — how proceedings should be coordinated, or substantively combined, when a corporate group fails across borders, and what duties directors of group companies bear in the period approaching insolvency.
• Restructuring and preventive frameworks — out-of-court and hybrid restructuring tools, preventive restructuring directives and their national transpositions, and the balance they strike between debtor rehabilitation and creditor protection.
• Comparative insolvency law — structured comparisons of national systems, bankruptcy reform in emerging and transitional economies, and the reception of foreign models into domestic law.
• Empirical and economic analysis — studies measuring how bankruptcy law performs, of which the journal's most-cited items include empirical work on the efficiency of bankruptcy law in Spain.
• Insolvency and neighbouring fields — arbitration and insolvency, financial institution failure, sovereign and public-sector distress in its legal dimensions, and the treatment of employees, pension claims and public creditors in proceedings.
• Case law and legislative intelligence — comments on significant decisions and reports of reforms, including the journal's coverage of bankruptcy reform across the Middle East and North Africa.

The OpenAlex topic profile for the journal, drawn from its published corpus, is consistent with this picture: the dominant topic is Corporate Insolvency and Governance, followed by Conflict of Laws and Jurisdiction, Financial Distress and Bankruptcy Prediction, Legal Cases and Commentary, and Legal Principles and Applications. In other words, the journal's centre of gravity is legal and institutional rather than purely financial, even though empirical and finance-adjacent work appears when it speaks to legal design.

Indexing and Measured Citation Record

The journal is covered by Scopus, which underlies the SCImago figures quoted by aggregators, and its articles carry DOIs through Wiley Online Library and are visible to Crossref-based services; Wiley displays the journal's most-cited recent articles based on Crossref citations, a list headed by work on the efficiency of bankruptcy law in Spain, on the EU preventive restructuring framework, and on bankruptcy reform in the Middle East and North Africa. That trio is a fair miniature of the journal: one empirical study, one analysis of a major regional instrument, and one multi-country reform survey.

Two independent citation pictures should be kept separate, because they count different things. The record previously held on this site, derived from Scopus/SCImago data, reported an h-index of 12 and an Impact Factor of 0.6; aggregator summaries of the same Scopus data report an SJR around 0.14–0.17 depending on the year consulted, which itself warns against treating any single year's figure as fixed. OpenAlex, which counts a broader corpus including books, comments and other item types, records for this source (OpenAlex source S178953182, fetched directly during this check) 833 works and 1,971 citations, an h-index of 20, an i10-index of 58 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.13. Neither picture is “the true one”: Scopus-based measures describe a curated journal corpus, OpenAlex measures a wider one, and the Journal Impact Factor is a Clarivate Journal Citation Reports figure that readers should verify in the current JCR rather than in any secondary profile, including this one. What all sources agree on is the shape of the journal: a small, specialist, low-volume law review whose influence is concentrated in a defined professional and academic community rather than spread across the sciences. In law, where citation cultures are slower and much influence flows through courts, practice and law reform rather than through citation counts, that profile is normal for a respected field journal and should not be read as a quality verdict.

One caution from the research for this profile deserves recording. An ISSN-endpoint query in OpenAlex at first resolved this journal's print ISSN to a known phantom source record (S4210178087) whose figures are unreliable and are therefore not cited here; the figures above come from a direct fetch of the verified source record S178953182, whose ISSN pair, title and publisher match the journal exactly. Readers replicating the numbers should resolve the journal by its online ISSN and confirm the source identity before quoting any totals.

Publishing Model, Fees and Access

International Insolvency Review is a subscription journal: the version of record sits on Wiley Online Library behind subscription or pay-per-view access, with institutional access through the usual Wiley channels. Whether any individual article can be made open access, and on what terms and charges, is governed by Wiley's current author policies for the journal; those specific fee figures are not published in the sources consulted for this profile, and authors who need open access for funder compliance should confirm the current options and any article publication charge directly with Wiley before submission rather than relying on third-party listings. The journal is not listed in DOAJ — DOAJ search-API queries for both of its ISSNs returned no record during this check — which is expected for a subscription law review and is not, by itself, a negative signal. Copyright in the journal as a whole is held by INSOL International and John Wiley & Sons Ltd, as the Wiley page states.

Guidance for Authors

Fit first. The single most consequential decision is whether the manuscript is genuinely international or comparative. A paper that analyses one country's statute in purely domestic terms, however well, will usually serve its author better in a national law journal. A paper that shows how a rule, case or reform interacts with foreign proceedings, foreign creditors or a cross-border instrument is the journal's natural content. Framing the international element explicitly in the introduction — rather than leaving referees to infer it — is the simplest way to signal fit.

Write for three audiences at once. The readership spans academics, judges and practitioners, and the Editorial Board mirrors that span. Doctrinal precision matters, but so does a clear statement of why a development matters in practice: what an office-holder, lender or court should do differently because of it. Case comments should extract the transferable principle from the decision, not merely summarise the facts. Empirical papers should explain their legal implications; doctrinal papers should acknowledge the empirical or practical evidence where it exists.

Use the journal's formats. Besides full articles, the journal carries case comments, book reviews and shorter communications, and special issues appear — including issues devoted to early-career insolvency research. A tightly argued comment on a significant recent judgment may be a better contribution than a stretched survey article, and prospective contributors of reviews or special-issue proposals should approach the editor through the Wiley journal page.

Process and practicalities. The journal is refereed: per INSOL's description, every item is rigorously evaluated by the Editor working with board members. Submission mechanics, formatting and reference style are those set out in Wiley's author guidelines for the journal, which authors should follow exactly; manuscripts that ignore house style are commonly returned for correction before review. Because the journal appears three times a year and is deliberately small, acceptance is competitive in a different way from large reviews: there are simply few slots, and topicality — a reform, judgment or instrument currently being debated — can matter. Nothing in the sources consulted supports any claim about average decision times, so no turnaround figure is stated here; authors working to a deadline should ask the editorial office directly.

Who Reads It, and What It Is Worth to Them

For insolvency scholars, the journal is one of the few English-language venues whose entire remit is their field's international dimension, which makes it both a natural citation target and a natural home for comparative work. For practitioners and judges, its value is intelligence: structured, refereed reporting of how other systems are solving problems — group insolvency, recognition, director duties near insolvency, preventive restructuring — that domestic sources cover only from one side. For legislators and regulators, the reform surveys and framework analyses collect international experience in one place. Libraries value it as the archival record the founding statement promised: a continuous, curated account of the development of cross-border insolvency law from 1990 to the present.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of International Insolvency Review?
Online ISSN 1099-1107; Print ISSN 1180-0518 (Wiley journal page; confirmed in OpenAlex).

Who publishes the journal?
John Wiley & Sons Ltd, on behalf of INSOL International. An older version of this site's record showed the publisher as the bare number “60”; that was a garbled field, corrected here.

How often does it appear?
Three times a year, as a refereed journal (INSOL description).

Who edits it?
The Wiley journal page names Paul J Omar as editor, working with an international Editorial Board of academics, judges and practitioners.

What are its citation metrics?
They depend on the database. The Scopus-derived record held here reported an h-index of 12 and an Impact Factor of 0.6; OpenAlex (direct fetch of source S178953182) records 833 works, 1,971 citations and an h-index of 20. Verify Journal Impact Factor figures in the current Journal Citation Reports.

Is it open access or listed in DOAJ?
It is a subscription journal on Wiley Online Library. DOAJ search-API queries for both ISSNs returned no record during this check, and any hybrid open-access charges are not published in the sources consulted — confirm them with Wiley.

What should I submit?
Work on insolvency, restructuring and debtor–creditor relations with a real international or comparative dimension: articles, case comments, book reviews and shorter communications on significant developments.

Sources

• Wiley Online Library, journal page for International Insolvency Review (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/10991107): ISSNs, editor name, publisher and INSOL relationship, copyright line, most-cited articles.
• INSOL International, “International Insolvency Review” page (insol.org): founding aims, thrice-yearly refereed model, board character, article types.
• OpenAlex source S178953182, fetched directly: works, citations, h-index, i10-index, two-year mean citedness, ISSN pair, topic profile, 1990–2026 span. (An initial ISSN-endpoint resolution to phantom source S4210178087 was discarded and is not cited.)
• DOAJ search API, queries for ISSN 1099-1107 and 1180-0518: no records returned.
• Scopus/SCImago-derived figures as previously held in this site's record (h-index 12; Impact Factor 0.6; coverage 1990–1991, 1993 onwards) and aggregator summaries reporting SJR 0.142–0.173 and Law/Finance quartiles — reported here as attributed, year-dependent values.
• Journals World post 32039 saved REST record: identity anchor (title, slug, ISSNs, stored metrics and the garbled publisher field corrected above).