About Neophilologus

Neophilologus: An International Journal of Modern and Medieval Language and Literature — Journal Profile

Neophilologus is an international peer-reviewed journal of modern and medieval language and literature, published by Springer Science+Business Media in the Netherlands. In full it is Neophilologus: An International Journal of Modern and Mediaeval Language and Literature — the spelling of the subtitle varies between "mediaeval" and "medieval" across records — and it is one of the long-lived European philology journals: a title founded in the Netherlands in 1915, whose first volume is dated 1916, and which has carried scholarship on the languages and literatures of Europe for more than a century. The journal carries print ISSN 0028-2677 and electronic ISSN 1572-8668, the pair carried on this Journals World record and confirmed on the publisher's journal page and in the OpenAlex source record, where Springer Science+Business Media is named as host publisher and the Netherlands as the country of publication. The earlier Journals World snapshot showed the publisher only as a numeric code; the verified publisher is Springer, and that correction is recorded in the sources note that accompanies this profile.

At a Glance

• Full title: Neophilologus: An International Journal of Modern and Medieval Language and Literature
• Short title: Neophilologus
• ISSN: 0028-2677 (print, also the linking ISSN); 1572-8668 (electronic)
• Publisher: Springer Science+Business Media (formerly Kluwer Academic Publishers), Netherlands
• Founded: 1915; first volume dated 1916
• Publishing model: Hybrid, as stated on the Springer journal page
• Editor-in-Chief named by Springer: Paul J. Smith
• Languages of publication, per Springer: English, French, German and Spanish (modern English specified)
• Springer journal metrics at checking: Journal Impact Factor 0.2 (2025); five-year Journal Impact Factor 0.2 (2025); median time from submission to first decision 89 days; 263,600 downloads in 2025
• Article types and fields: Literary theory, comparative literature, philology and textual criticism within its scope statement
• OpenAlex source at checking (23 October 2026): 5,458 works and 9,291 citations recorded; OpenAlex h-index 30; OpenAlex-listed APC USD 3,090

Identity and History

Neophilologus was created in the mid-1910s as a Dutch-based journal for the "new philologies" — the modern languages and their literatures, studied with the same rigour that classical philology applied to Greek and Latin, and reaching back into the medieval roots of those literatures. The journal is generally dated from 1915, and its first volume appeared in 1916; the Electronic Journals Library record likewise gives full text from volume 1, issue 1 (1916), and the coverage carried on this Journals World record spans 1916 onward, with the interruptions and compressions that two world wars imposed on European scholarly publishing visible in the run. For most of the twentieth century the journal was a Kluwer Academic Publishers title; the Electronic Journals Library names Springer Science+Business Media B.V. as publisher, formerly Kluwer Academic Publishers, which records the ownership line that brought the journal into the modern Springer portfolio. Its volume numbering tells the longevity story by itself: the Springer page at checking showed volume 110, issue 3, dated September 2026, meaning the journal has sustained an annual volume rhythm across eleven decades.

Survival is itself part of this journal's meaning. A philology journal founded before the First World War's end, published from a small country with four major literary languages in its remit, could easily have narrowed into a local outlet. Instead it kept an international authorship and readership, and its archive became a cross-section of twentieth-century European literary scholarship: medieval romance and Middle Dutch texts, Renaissance and Golden Age studies, German and French literary history, Spanish Golden Age and modern literature, and the theoretical turns that successively reshaped all of them. Researchers citing older volumes should remember that the journal's centre of gravity has shifted over time — mid-century issues carry more purely philological and textual work, recent issues more comparative and theoretical work — while the four-language, modern-plus-medieval architecture has stayed recognisably the same.

Scope: What Neophilologus Publishes

Springer's current aims and scope statement is the authoritative summary, and this profile follows it. Neophilologus is an international peer-reviewed journal devoted to the study of Anglophone, Francophone, Germanophone and Hispanic language and literature, both modern and medieval. Topics of interest include literary theory, comparative literature, philology and textual criticism. The languages of publication are modern English, French, German and Spanish. Older descriptions of the journal also listed Italian among its languages of publication and described five publication languages; the current Springer statement names four, and authors planning a submission in Italian should ask the editorial office before preparing it rather than relying on an older listing. The four named literary cultures are the journal's architecture, not a loose preference: a submission should belong recognisably to one of them, or work comparatively across them, and medieval and modern material are equally at home, which makes the journal one of the comparatively few venues where a paper on a fifteenth-century text and a paper on a twenty-first-century novel are read by the same editorial community as parts of one discipline.

OpenAlex's topic profile of the archive, checked for this profile, shows where a century of that scope has actually landed: Medieval Literature and History is the largest grouping, followed by Classical Studies and Philology, German Literature and Culture Studies, broader historical and cultural studies, and Renaissance Literature and Culture. That distribution is a useful corrective to the title's modern-languages origin story — in practice the journal's medieval and early modern work is its largest single mass, and its identity today is best described as a general European philology journal with a medieval centre of weight and a genuinely comparative habit. The DOI stem of its modern articles, 10.1007/s11061, ties the archive to the Springer journal number 11061, the address under which the journal's volumes, issues and online-first articles are organised.

Metrics and How to Read Them

Springer publishes the headline metrics authors usually ask about, and at checking its journal page gave a Journal Impact Factor of 0.2 for 2025 and a five-year Journal Impact Factor of 0.2 for 2025, a median of 89 days from submission to first decision, and 263,600 downloads during 2025. The earlier Journals World snapshot recorded an Impact Factor of 0.2 and an h-index of 14, consistent on the impact figure with the publisher's current statement. OpenAlex, checked directly on 23 October 2026 through the ISSN lookups for 1572-8668 and 0028-2677, records one source carrying both ISSNs with 5,458 works, 9,291 citations, an h-index of 30, an i10-index of 187 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.10; OpenAlex also lists an article processing charge of USD 3,090 for the title, which is the figure an author choosing the journal's hybrid open access route should expect to have confirmed in the publisher's own fee pages before submitting, since charges change and the OpenAlex figure is a listing, not a contract. Read as a set, these numbers describe a century-deep archive of more than five thousand works, modest short-window citation rates typical of literary philology — a field where influence travels through editions, monographs and teaching over decades — and a download count that shows the archive is actively read far beyond the circle of scholars who cite it. Searches of the Directory of Open Access Journals by both ISSNs returned no records on 23 October 2026, which fits the hybrid model Springer states: subscription access as the default, with an open access route for individual articles.

Distinguishing Neophilologus from Similar Titles

No journal in this profile's set needs its disambiguation section more. Philologus (print ISSN 0031-7985, electronic 2196-7008) is the venerable German journal for ancient literature and its reception, founded in 1846 — classical, not modern, philology. Studia Neophilologica is a separate Taylor & Francis journal for English and Germanic philology. Neophilologica (ISSN 0208-5550 and 2353-088X) is a Polish journal of Romance and general linguistics from the University of Silesia. The Russian journal Neophilology (Неофилология, ISSN 2587-6953 and 2782-5868) is again a different publication. The twin check for this profile found all four titles in site searches connected with this journal's name or ISSN strings — in each case their own profile headings carry different ISSNs, and the mentions of Neophilologus inside their texts are cross-references, not identity. Site searches by this journal's own two ISSNs in hyphenated form returned records that, on direct checking of their headings, proved to be those neighbouring journals citing or contrasting themselves with it; the digits-only searches and the exact slug check returned this record, and no second Journals World record carrying both of this journal's ISSNs in its own heading was found. In reference lists, always pair the title with the print ISSN 0028-2677 or the Springer journal number 11061; the bare name is one syllable away from at least four other journals.

Guidance for Authors

Start on the Springer journal page, which carries the aims and scope, the editorial board, the submission guidelines and the journal's stated hybrid publishing model, and submit through Springer's manuscript route from that page. Choose the language deliberately: writing in English maximises the reviewing pool, but the journal's willingness to publish in French, German and Spanish is a real feature of its identity, and a paper whose scholarly conversation is primarily in one of those languages can legitimately appear in it — with the caution already given about Italian. Match the article to the four-culture architecture or make the comparative move explicit; a purely national-literature paper with no outward connection can still fit, but it should be framed so that readers from the journal's other philologies can see why it belongs in a shared journal. Textual and philological claims need their evidence visible: quote accurately, give editions, and let textual criticism show its working, because this readership checks. Theorise in contact with texts — the scope names literary theory as an interest, but the journal's tradition is theory applied to language and literature, not free-standing abstraction. On process, the publisher's stated median of 89 days to a first decision is the planning figure to use; on cost, confirm the current open access charge with Springer before choosing that route, treating the USD 3,090 figure listed by OpenAlex as indicative. Reviews and shorter notes have historically had a place in journals of this type, but no current article-type list beyond the scope statement was verified for this title at checking, so authors with a note, edition or review proposal should write to the editorial office first rather than assuming a format.

Who Should Read and Cite Neophilologus

Medievalists, early modernists and modern-language literary scholars across the English, French, German and Spanish traditions; comparatists who need a venue that treats comparison as normal practice rather than as a special method; textual scholars and editors; and historians of philology itself, for whom the back run is primary evidence. For librarians and students, the journal is a reliable orientation point: a century of volumes in which the modern European philologies argued with themselves, in four languages, about what their objects were.

Reading Neophilologus: A Century of Philology in Practice

The archive is the argument. More than five thousand works recorded in OpenAlex, spread across a run that begins in 1916, means that for almost any topic inside its four literary cultures there is a reasonable chance the journal has touched it — a Middle Dutch romance, a French medieval allegory, a Spanish Golden Age play, a German novella, an English Renaissance lyric, or the theory by which such texts are read. That depth changes how the journal should be used. For a literature search inside its fields, Neophilologus is not a journal to check after the main databases; it is one of the strata the databases index, and a search that misses its older volumes misses work written when philology's standards of textual evidence were at their most exacting. Older articles in French, German or Spanish are not superseded antiques: in textual criticism and medieval studies, an edition note or a dating argument from decades ago may still be the load-bearing reference, which is one reason the journal's citation pattern is slow and long rather than fast and brief.

The journal's four-language structure also trains a particular kind of reader. A Hispanist publishing here writes for colleagues who may approach from German or English studies; a medievalist writes for modernists in the same covers. The comparative habit that Springer's scope statement names is therefore not decorative — it is forced by the table of contents. Authors who thrive in the journal tend to make their stakes portable: the textual problem, the genre question or the theoretical claim is stated in terms a neighbouring philology can recognise, even when the evidence is firmly inside one language tradition. Readers benefit symmetrically: browsing an issue outside one's own field is a low-cost way to watch another philology solve a shared problem differently. That, more than any single metric, explains how a journal founded in the Netherlands in 1915 still justifies its place in a crowded century: it remains one of the few rooms where the European philologies, medieval and modern, still meet as one discipline.

Access and the Springer Platform

The journal lives on Springer's platform under journal number 11061, where volumes and issues, online-first articles, the editorial board, ethics and disclosure policies, rights and permissions information and the submission route are gathered in one place. Access is by subscription as the default, consistent with the hybrid model Springer states, with individual articles able to appear openly where the author has taken the open access route; the download figure Springer reports for 2025 — 263,600 downloads — indicates an archive in heavy daily use through institutional holdings. Libraries have carried the title across its changes of publisher, from the Kluwer years into the Springer era, and the Electronic Journals Library record that documents that succession is a useful finding aid for holdings that span the change. For readers, the practical consequence is continuity: a citation from any decade of the journal's life resolves into the same platform and the same volume sequence, which is exactly what a reference in a 1916-founded journal requires.

Two records questions deserve a direct answer, because cataloguers meet both. The founding date is given as 1915 in accounts of the journal's creation and as 1916 in records that date a journal by its first volume, such as the Electronic Journals Library's full-text start at volume 1, issue 1 (1916) and the OpenAlex source record, whose first publication year is likewise 1916. This profile states both, in that form, rather than pretending the discrepancy away. The subtitle spelling is similar: "mediaeval" appears in the journal's historic full title and in some current records, "medieval" in others, including Springer's present-day presentation; they are one title, and a catalogue search should try both spellings. Neither point affects identity, which the ISSN pair fixes, but both explain why reference lists and library records for this journal look less tidy than its century of continuous publication might suggest.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who publishes Neophilologus? Springer Science+Business Media, in the Netherlands, succeeding Kluwer Academic Publishers. The numeric publisher code in the earlier Journals World snapshot resolves to that publisher.

What are its ISSNs? Print 0028-2677; electronic 1572-8668.

When was Neophilologus founded? In 1915, with its first volume dated 1916.

In which languages does it publish? English, French, German and Spanish, per Springer's current scope statement.

What is its Impact Factor? Springer states a Journal Impact Factor of 0.2 (2025) and a five-year figure of 0.2 (2025), checked on 23 October 2026.

What metrics were verified for this profile? OpenAlex, at checking: 5,458 works, 9,291 citations, h-index 30, i10-index 187, and an OpenAlex-listed APC of USD 3,090 for the source carrying both ISSNs. The earlier snapshot's h-index of 14 comes from a different counting system. Springer's own page, also checked directly, gives the 2025 impact figures, the 89-day median first-decision time and the 2025 download count quoted in this profile, each attributed to the publisher at the date of checking rather than treated as a permanent property of the journal.