Journal of Modern Turkish History

About Journal of Modern Turkish History

Journal of Modern Turkish History — Journal Profile

Publisher: Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History, Hacettepe University (Ankara, Türkiye)  |  ISSN: 1305-1458 (print), 2147-1592 (electronic)  |  Founded: 2005  |  Frequency: 2 issues per year (June and December)  |  Languages: Turkish and English  |  Field: Social, political, economic and cultural history of Türkiye and its neighbouring countries from the nineteenth century onward

Overview

The Journal of Modern Turkish History, known by its Turkish abbreviation CTAD, is an international, peer-reviewed scholarly journal published twice a year, in June and December, by the Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History at Hacettepe University in Ankara. Founded in 2005, it has reached its twenty-second year and forty-fourth issue by spring 2026, according to the journal's own site — a continuous run that makes it one of the established venues for the modern history of Türkiye. The journal publishes manuscripts in Turkish and English, and its stated field is the cross-disciplinary study of the social, political, economic and cultural history of Türkiye and its neighbouring countries from the beginning of Ottoman modernisation in the nineteenth century to the present day.

That chronological framing is the journal's defining choice. Ottoman modernisation — the Tanzimat reforms, the constitutional experiments, the transformation of state, army, law, education and economy across the long nineteenth century — is treated not as a prelude to be hurried past but as the opening of the modern story itself, and the journal follows that story through the collapse of the Empire, the War of Independence, the founding of the Republic, the single-party and multi-party eras, and the social and economic transformations of the later twentieth century. Because the Institute that publishes it is devoted to the history of the Atatürk era and the Republic, the journal carries particular weight in Republican history, but its pages range well beyond political biography: recent issues carry work on social norms in the late Ottoman Empire, municipal government and urban reconstruction, submarine warfare in the First World War, the chrome trade between Türkiye and Germany during the Second World War, corruption debates during the transition to multi-party politics, tobacco policy under etatism, women's organisations in the early Republic, education history, and the foreign-policy history of the Cyprus and Gulf crises, read from Turkish, German, Hungarian and British archives.

Aims and Scope

The journal's scope, as stated in its own descriptions, is to provide a wide scope of cross-disciplinary studies on the social, political, economic and cultural history of Türkiye and its neighbouring countries from the beginning of Ottoman modernisation in the nineteenth century, and to bring together research on the modern history of Türkiye and its neighbours across the humanities and social sciences, giving scholars a platform that covers, without being restricted to, their particular fields of specialisation. In practice that means the journal welcomes archival political and diplomatic history alongside social history, economic history, cultural history, the history of education, women's and gender history, military history, and studies of the press and public life — provided the work is anchored in the period from the nineteenth century onward and speaks to the modern history of Türkiye or the wider region it shaped and was shaped by.

The regional wording matters. "Türkiye and its neighbouring countries" is not decorative: the Ottoman world, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Iran, the Arab provinces and the Eastern Mediterranean all fall within the journal's horizon where their histories intersect with the modern Turkish story, and articles drawing on the archives and historiographies of those neighbours are a recurring feature. The Spring 2026 issue, for example, places a study of Enver Pasha in the Hungarian press and an evaluation of the Greek community's willingness to co-govern with the Turks in Cyprus, covering municipalities from 1878 to 1963, alongside domestic Turkish topics — an issue architecture that shows the journal's editors building each number as a small cross-section of the field rather than a single-theme collection.

Publisher and Institutional Home

CTAD is published by the Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History (Atatürk İlkeleri ve İnkılâp Tarihi Enstitüsü) at Hacettepe University, Beytepe, Ankara. Institute-based publishing gives the journal a stable institutional home: it is not a commercial title, and its continuity since 2005 reflects the Institute's own teaching and research mission in the history of the Turkish Republic and the principles of the Atatürk era. The journal's site lists the Institute's address and contact numbers, and gives a dedicated editorial email address for manuscript submission. The editorial board states that it claims no responsibility for the arguments asserted in published manuscripts — the views are the authors' — and that authors are committed to comply with the principles of ethics in research and publication.

Ethics and originality are handled concretely rather than rhetorically: articles sent to the journal are screened with the Turnitin application against possible plagiarism, a practice the journal states openly on its homepage. Authors should therefore expect similarity screening as a routine first step, ensure that archival quotations and translated passages are properly marked and attributed, and understand that unacknowledged overlap will be caught before review rather than after it.

Publication Pattern and Archive

The journal appears twice a year, in June and December, and its site maintains a full archive by year and issue, from the early volumes to the current year 22, issue 44 (Spring 2026). One detail of the archive deserves emphasis because it shows the journal's attitude to its own backfile: the first eight issues, originally published in print, were scanned, transferred to digital media and made available to readers with open access, a project for which the Editorial Board publicly thanked the Director and staff of the TDV Centre for Islamic Studies (İSAM) Library. Full texts of current issues are likewise presented on the journal's site under "Tam Metin" (full text) links for each article. For researchers, the practical result is that two decades of scholarship on modern Turkish history can be read in one place, in Turkish and English, without chasing print volumes across libraries.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal states on its homepage that it is indexed and abstracted in ERIH PLUS, the Emerging Sources Citation Index of Web of Science, EBSCO, Historical Abstracts, Index Islamicus, Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies, the MLA International Bibliography, ProQuest and Scopus (Elsevier). That is a well-chosen portfolio for a history journal published from Ankara: Historical Abstracts and the MLA bibliography serve the historical and literary readership, Index Islamicus and Middle Eastern and Central Asian Studies serve the regional-studies readership, ERIH PLUS signals standing among European humanities journals, and Scopus and the Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation Index provide the citation tracking that universities and funders increasingly require. The Directory of Open Access Journals was checked through its search API for both of the journal's ISSNs and returned no listing, so authors should not describe the journal as DOAJ-listed; its discoverability rests on the services above and on its own open archive.

Metrics and Standing

CTAD is a small, specialist, slow-citing humanities journal, and its metrics should be read in that light. The JournalsWorld record for the title carries an h-index of 3, which matches the Scopus-based SCImago figure reported by secondary listings: a SCImago Journal Rank around 0.123, with the journal placed in the History category. Scopus-based aggregator listings report a CiteScore of 0.1 and a SNIP of about 0.12 for the journal. These numbers describe a niche title whose articles are typically long, archive-based contributions in Turkish or English on specific problems of Ottoman and Republican history; such articles accumulate citations slowly, often in books and in Turkish-language scholarship that citation databases under-count, so the raw metrics understate the journal's actual use within its field.

Two further cautions belong in any honest profile. First, quartile labels for this journal differ between sources and years: SCImago-based listings have placed it in Q3 for History, while this directory's stored category field says Q2, so the quartile should always be cited with its source and year rather than as a bare letter. Second, OpenAlex returned no source record for either of the journal's ISSNs when checked through its ISSN endpoint for this profile, so no OpenAlex works or citation totals are quoted here; inventing a figure to fill that gap would mislead readers, and the absence simply means this particular aggregator has not built a source record under these ISSNs.

What the metrics cannot show, but the archive can, is consistency: forty-four issues over twenty-two years, a stable twice-yearly rhythm, indexing in both the major citation databases and the specialist bibliographies of history and Middle Eastern studies, and a current issue whose table of contents spans Ottoman social history, First and Second World War studies, Republican political and economic history, and the history of Cyprus and of Turkish foreign policy. For a historian of modern Türkiye, that combination — institutional stability, bilingual publication and genuine archival range — is the reason the journal is cited in the field's footnotes regardless of what any single metric says.

Author Information

Manuscripts in Turkish or English may be submitted to the journal through the editorial contact given on its site, which lists a dedicated submission email address at the Institute. Articles should follow the journal's editorial principles and author guidelines, which are published on the journal's site alongside its publication ethics pages. Submissions are screened with Turnitin, so authors should ensure before sending that quotations, translations and any text recycled from their own earlier work are handled transparently. No submission or article processing charge is stated on the journal's homepage; if a fee is material to your decision, confirm the current position with the editorial office before submitting, because the absence of a published charge on the homepage should be read as "not published" rather than as a guarantee for all future issues. Authors whose first language is neither Turkish nor English should note that the journal publishes in those two languages only, and should arrange translation and language editing before submission rather than expecting the journal to provide it.

Fit can be judged against three questions. Is your period the nineteenth century or later, or does your earlier material speak directly to Ottoman modernisation? Is your evidence base archival or otherwise primary, in line with the journal's practice of publishing document-driven history, including work in foreign archives and foreign-language presses? And does your argument address the history of Türkiye or its neighbours in a way that a reader outside your sub-field — a historian of education reading a diplomatic history article, for example — can follow? Work that answers yes to all three is the work this journal exists to publish. Before submitting, check the journal's current guidelines and the most recent issue on its own site, since editorial details are updated there first.

A Note on Names

CTAD is the journal's own abbreviation and appears in its masthead and web address; the full English title is the Journal of Modern Turkish History. Readers should be aware that a different Turkish journal with a similar Turkish name, published by another university institute and listed separately on Türkiye's DergiPark platform, covers overlapping ground; the ISSN pair is the reliable discriminator. Records carrying ISSN 1305-1458 or e-ISSN 2147-1592, published from Hacettepe University's Atatürk Institute in Ankara, refer to the journal profiled here, and citations should be checked against those numbers before they are trusted.

Inside a Recent Issue: The Journal in Practice

The Spring 2026 issue (year 22, issue 44) is a useful specimen of how the editors assemble the journal. It opens with studies of the late Ottoman world: social norms (adab) as an instrument of social order in the Empire between 1908 and 1918; power struggles within the Sublime Porte and French influence in the establishment of the Council of State; and the great fire of Beyoğlu and the reconstruction of its streets between 1870 and 1910, treated as a problem of local government. Military and wartime history follows, with a doctrinal reading of the German submarine U-21's 1914–1915 war diary and logbook, and a study of how the Hungarian press evaluated Enver Pasha. The Republican era is then covered from several directions at once: the social, economic and substructural foundations of the Kemalist revolution behind Atatürk's public image; Atatürk's famous saying about a nation deprived of art, reassessed in the context of craft; the writer Namdar Rahmi Karatay's perspective on the Turkish Revolution; satire of high society in the early Republican press, studied through the Dolmabahçe incident as a method of balancing class inequality; and the activities of Turkish women's organisations between 1929 and 1935 and their contribution to forming the "modern woman" in Türkiye.

The later pages of the same issue widen the lens further: the establishment of the Liberal Republican Party as seen in Turkish diplomatic reports; the history of Antalya Secondary School between 1924 and 1933; the first and second Tobacco Congresses and the determination of tobacco policy in the etatism period; state economic enterprises and their subsidiaries as an apparatus of private capital between 1946 and 1960; the chrome trade between Türkiye and Germany during the Second World War in the light of German documents; debates on corruption during the transition to multi-party politics between 1943 and 1948; a content analysis of a People's House journal from Tire as local cultural preservation; efforts to legitimise socialism in Anatolia through the milieu of the Workers' Party of Türkiye and its newspaper; the Greek community's willingness to co-govern with the Turks in Cyprus through municipalities from 1878 to 1963; and the effects of the Gulf Crisis on the Turkish economy according to British archival sources. Twenty-one research articles in a single issue, drawn from Ottoman, Turkish, German, Hungarian and British sources, is a concrete demonstration that the journal's cross-disciplinary, archive-first scope statement describes real editorial practice rather than aspiration.

Language, Readership and Historiographical Role

Bilingual publication in Turkish and English shapes who the journal serves. Turkish-language articles keep the journal at the centre of scholarship inside Türkiye, where the primary readership for archive-based Ottoman and Republican history works in Turkish; English-language articles, and English titles and summaries across the journal, carry that scholarship to the international community of Ottomanists and historians of the modern Middle East who cannot follow the Turkish literature directly. For the field, that bridging function is valuable in both directions: debates conducted in Turkish journals reach Anglophone scholars sooner, and international scholars have a peer-reviewed venue, indexed in Scopus and the Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation Index, in which to publish alongside Turkish colleagues on shared questions. Doctoral students in Türkiye use the journal as a first serious venue for dissertation-derived articles, while the presence of senior scholars' archival studies in the same issues gives those early publications a demanding standard to meet.

Historiographically, the journal belongs to the generation of Turkish history journals that professionalised the study of the late Ottoman and Republican periods around primary sources: state archives in Ankara and Istanbul, foreign ministry and military archives abroad, the periodical press, memoirs and institutional records. Its insistence on the long view — beginning with nineteenth-century Ottoman modernisation rather than with 1923 — aligns it with the broad scholarly consensus that the Republic's institutions, ideologies and social transformations cannot be understood without their late Ottoman roots, and its equal willingness to publish social, economic and cultural history alongside political and diplomatic history keeps that long view from narrowing into a purely state-centred story. A journal that can publish, in one issue, submarine warfare doctrine, tobacco congresses, secondary schools and satirical magazines is practising the widened definition of modern Turkish history that its aims announce.

Using This Journal as a Reader

For readers rather than authors, the fastest way into the journal is through its online archive, which is organised by year and issue and presents each article with a full-text link. Because article titles are given in English on the journal's English pages even where the article itself is in Turkish, an English-only reader can survey two decades of contents quickly and identify the English-language articles, while readers with Turkish can use the archive as a starting bibliography for almost any topic in late Ottoman or Republican history. Each issue closes with its list of referees and its editorial principles and ethical rules, a transparency habit that also helps librarians and evaluators verify the journal's peer-review practice. When citing the journal, give the year, volume and issue as the journal itself presents them, and use the ISSN pair from this profile's header to confirm that a database record really refers to the Hacettepe journal.