Revista de Historia Industrial

About Revista de Historia Industrial

Revista de Historia Industrial — Industrial History Review — Journal Profile

Revista de Historia Industrial – Industrial History Review (abbreviated RHI-IHR) is a peer-reviewed journal of economic and industrial history published by the Universitat de Barcelona in Spain. It was founded in 1992 by Jordi Nadal (1929–2020), one of the most important Spanish economic historians of the twentieth century, and it remains edited from the university's Department of Economic History and Institutions. The journal publishes research that investigates processes of industrialisation and the social, economic, institutional, environmental and demographic transformations that accompany them, in English and Spanish, in three regular issues a year plus special issues, fully open access. It carries print ISSN 1132-7200 and online ISSN 2385-3247 — the pair stored on this JournalsWorld record, confirmed on the journal's own site at revistes.ub.edu and in its Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) record. In the Clarivate Journal Citation Reports figures the journal itself publishes, it stands Q1 in History in the Social Sciences Citation Index — a senior position among economic-history journals — and it is one of the field's established European venues, with a book-review section and a public-facing blog, "The Great Spurt", alongside the scholarly issues.

History and identity

The journal was founded in 1992 by Jordi Nadal, who also directed it in its founding years. Nadal, a disciple of Jaume Vicens Vives and professor at the Universitat de Barcelona, built his reputation on the demographic and industrial history of Spain — works on Spanish population from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, on the beginnings of Spanish industrialisation, and on Catalonia as "the factory of Spain". The journal he founded carried that programme into a standing institution: a Barcelona-based review where the industrialisation of Spain and Catalonia could be studied alongside the industrialisation of the rest of the world, with full-length articles on all world regions welcomed from the start.

The bilingual title the journal now uses — Revista de Historia Industrial – Industrial History Review — reflects a deliberate internationalisation of that original Spanish-language project. Manuscripts are published in English and Spanish; the editorial team pairs its Barcelona base (editor-in-chief Ramon Ramon-Muñoz) with a co-editor at the Università di Siena (Gabriele Cappelli) and associate editors in Milan, Barcelona, Bogotá, Madrid, Lund and Buenos Aires, a geography that mirrors the journal's author base. The journal's 2024 leaflet describes its mission in the same terms as its about page: advancing the understanding of industrialisation processes and their institutional, demographic, social, economic and environmental transformations, with methodological diversity that runs from historical macroeconomic analysis to business history and from qualitative work to statistical and cliometric analysis.

Access history is part of the journal's identity too. The journal has applied a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence since 2019 — the year DOAJ records as its open-access start — and the University of Barcelona holds the copyright of published contents, with texts distributed under CC BY. Before 2019 it operated a partial open-access policy: articles were open for the first two months after publication, after which access to the most recent four issues was restricted to subscribers, while Early View articles were always open. That restriction on the latest four issues lasted until 2024; the journal is now simply an open access journal, as its about page states.

Scope and subjects

The about page defines the field broadly within economic history. The journal investigates processes of industrialisation and the transformations associated with them, including the evolution of incomes and living standards, education and human capital, political economy, inequality, trade, and money and banking. It welcomes full-length articles on all world regions, asks that they contribute to existing debates or draw attention to new lines of research, and encourages methodological diversity: historical macroeconomic studies, business history, qualitative analysis, and statistical and cliometric work all sit within its remit. A book-review section serves the field alongside the articles, and special issues gather work on single themes.

Its readership, as the journal describes it, is specialists in economic history together with scholars interested in economics and history more broadly, including graduate students and junior researchers — and, through the blog "The Great Spurt" and social media, a wider public audience for economic-history findings. Recent article subjects visible on the journal's platform give the flavour: state industrialisation and deindustrialisation policy in Spanish steel in the second half of the twentieth century; the international competitiveness of Spanish firms and its determining factors, evaluated from two decades of business and industrial history research. DOAJ summarises the journal's territory with the keywords economic history, history, economics, industry and business history, under the subject heading for economic history and conditions.

Editorial process and peer review

Submissions are made through the journal's page on the Universitat de Barcelona's Revistes UB platform (revistes.ub.edu, journal path HistoriaIndustrial), which carries the submission guidelines and a quick guide for references. DOAJ classifies the review model as double anonymous peer review. Unusually among journals, RHI-IHR publishes its own recent editorial performance statistics on its about page, and they are worth quoting because they let authors plan: for manuscripts submitted between 2021 and 2025, the average time from submission to first editorial decision was 16 days; from submission to first post-review decision, 105 days; and from acceptance to online publication, 52 days. The journal received on average 51 manuscripts per year in that period and accepted 40 per cent of them for publication. DOAJ's recorded publication time of 13 weeks sits consistently with the journal's own post-review and production figures.

Usage figures on the same page indicate a working international readership: downloads and views on the journal's website averaged about 60,000 per year in 2021–2025 and about 100,000 in 2025, distributed across North America (25.3 per cent), Southern Europe (19.1 per cent), the rest of Europe (14.4 per cent), Asia (10.7 per cent), South America (10.1 per cent) and Africa and Oceania (1.7 per cent), with the remainder unattributed. The journal also publishes its gender distribution across authorship, reviewing and editorial roles for 2025 — authorship 33.3 per cent women, peer reviewing 35.0 per cent, editorial board 57.1 per cent, advisory board 36.0 per cent — a transparency practice still uncommon among journals of its generation.

Metrics and indexing

The journal's about page carries its current metric panel, and the figures below are the journal's own published values from that page, each attached to its source. In the Journal Citation Reports (Clarivate) 2025 edition, the journal is Q1 in History, Q3 in History of Social Sciences and Q4 in Economics and in Business in the SSCI, with a Journal Impact Factor of 0.5 (third-party JCR trackers give 0.57 for 2025) and a best percentile of 78th in History. In the Scopus CiteScore 2025 edition it is Q1 in History, Q2 in History and Philosophy of Science and Q3 in several social-science and economics categories, with a CiteScore of 1.2 and a best percentile of 86th in History. Its SJR (SCImago) 2025 value is 0.180, Q2 in History and Q3 in History and Philosophy of Science, and its SNIP (CWTS) 2023 value is 0.368, Q1 in history and several neighbouring categories. It holds the FECYT Quality Seal in the 2025 edition, the Spanish national quality certification for scholarly journals.

OpenAlex's source record (S48393686), resolved through the OpenAlex ISSN endpoint at checking time, grouped 918 works with 1,661 citations, an h-index of 17 and an i10-index of 40. The h-index of 13 carried in this record's older template text is the SCImago-derived figure (SCImago-based listings again gave 13 for 2025); the difference between 13 and 17 is a database-coverage difference, and any quoted figure should carry its source. One caution applies to the OpenAlex record itself: its first-publication-year field reaches back implausibly before the journal existed, a sign that the record absorbs some stray older items; the founding date of 1992 rests on the journal's and university's own publications, not on that field.

Indexing is extensive. The journal is included in Journal Citation Reports / Social Sciences Citation Index and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index, in Scopus, and in the Spanish services INRECS, IDR and DICE; its articles are indexed in EconLit, Historical Abstracts, Dialnet, Latindex and Cindoc-Isoc, among other repositories. It is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals — the DOAJ search API returned its record for both ISSNs when checked for this profile — with preservation recorded through LOCKSS. The "1996, 2011–2025" coverage string in this record's older template is the Scopus coverage pattern, not the journal's lifespan: the journal has published since 1992.

Open access, fees and licensing

RHI-IHR is a fully open access journal with no article processing charge and no other charges recorded by DOAJ — a university-carried ("diamond") arrangement in practical terms, published by the Universitat de Barcelona on its own platform. Authors assign their intellectual-property rights to the publisher, and the University of Barcelona holds the copyright ownership of published contents; the publisher then distributes the texts under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence, which allows others to share the work provided they acknowledge the authorship, the initial publication in the journal and the licence conditions. The CC BY regime has applied since 2019; the journal's earlier partial-access history is described in the history section above. DOAJ records preservation via LOCKSS, and articles carry DOIs under the prefix 10.1344/rhi.

How to submit

Submit through the Revistes UB platform page for the journal, following its submission section and quick guide for references. The journal publishes full-length articles in English and Spanish; book reviews are handled through the same editorial office. Fit is judged against a clear remit — industrialisation and its social, economic, institutional, environmental and demographic transformations, in any world region — and against the journal's preference for work that engages an existing debate or opens a new line of research. The published editorial statistics set realistic expectations: a first editorial decision in about 16 days on the 2021–2025 average, a first post-review decision in about 105 days, and roughly two months from acceptance to online publication via Early View, ahead of the March, July or November issue. With an acceptance rate around 40 per cent on the journal's own figures, manuscripts should be sent finished and positioned against the literature the journal itself publishes.

Outreach, special issues and the shape of a volume

A reader who opens a current volume finds three regular issues a year, each mixing full-length research articles with the book-review section through which the journal maps new work in economic history for its community. Special issues sit alongside the regular cycle, gathering clusters of papers on a single theme. Between issues, the Early View service carries completed articles online ahead of their print issue — the journal's leaflet highlights this as its route to timely access — so the version of record for a new article typically appears online weeks before the March, July or November issue that formally contains it. Bibliographic details on the platform show the pattern in practice: articles carry their volume, issue and page range together with a DOI under the 10.1344/rhi prefix and a licence notice restating the CC BY terms and the pre-2019 access history.

The journal also works deliberately at public communication, unusual for a title founded in 1992. Its blog, "The Great Spurt" — the name is a nod to the classic literature on industrial take-off — together with its social-media presence, is described by the journal as its channel for spreading information to the wider public, and its about page reports the audience honestly: roughly 100,000 downloads and views in 2025, with the largest single share from North America, ahead of Southern Europe. For authors, that means an article here is not only a line in an index: it enters a venue that actively promotes economic-history research beyond the academy, in both of the journal's languages. The FECYT Quality Seal the journal holds in its 2025 edition — the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology's certification of editorial quality for scholarly journals — underwrites the editorial side of that promise, and the journal's published statistics on decisions, acceptance and readership, updated on its about page, let prospective authors verify the operation for themselves before submitting.

The journal's platform deserves a note for authors navigating submission. Revistes UB (RCUB) is the Universitat de Barcelona's journal platform, coordinated by the university's CRAI library service and running on the open-source OJS/PKP system — the same system used by thousands of university journals — with the journal's pages offered in Catalan, English and Spanish. Practical consequences follow: the submission workflow, the reference quick guide and the article pages all follow the standard OJS patterns, the journal's announcements and indexing panel are maintained on the platform itself, and the legal and ethical declarations linked from every page are the university's. Authors who have used OJS elsewhere will find the route familiar; those who have not should start from the journal's own "Submissions" and "Quick guide for references" pages rather than from third-party summaries, which in this journal's case have attached outdated coverage dates and even incorrect open-access claims to a title that is, on its own current pages, fully open.

Similar journals in this directory

Readers in industrial and economic history may also consult H-Industri@ (H-industria), the Spanish-language journal of the history of industry and development in Latin America published in Buenos Aires; Recerques: Història, Economia, Cultura, the Catalan history, economy and culture journal founded in Barcelona in 1970; Revista Română de Istorie Economică, the Romanian Journal of Economic History from Cluj-Napoca; and Revista de Economía Crítica, the Spanish political-economy journal from Seville. Each carries its own full depth profile in this directory.

Frequently asked questions

What are the ISSNs of Revista de Historia Industrial? Print ISSN 1132-7200 and online ISSN 2385-3247, shown on the journal's own site and in its DOAJ record.

Who publishes the journal, and when was it founded? The Universitat de Barcelona, through its Department of Economic History and Institutions. It was founded in 1992 by the economic historian Jordi Nadal.

Is Revista de Historia Industrial the same as Industrial History Review? Yes — the journal uses the combined bilingual title Revista de Historia Industrial – Industrial History Review (RHI-IHR). Directory entries under either half of the title refer to this journal.

Is the journal open access, and does it charge authors? It is fully open access, and DOAJ records no article processing charge and no other charges. Texts are distributed under CC BY, with copyright held by the University of Barcelona.

How often does it appear? Three regular issues a year, published in the first halves of March, July and November, plus special issues; accepted articles appear earlier through Early View.

What are its current rankings? On the journal's own about page (JCR 2025 edition): Q1 in History (SSCI) with a Journal Impact Factor of 0.5; CiteScore 1.2 (Scopus 2025), Q1 in History; SJR 0.180 (2025), Q2 in History.

In what languages can I submit? The journal publishes manuscripts in English and Spanish.

How long does review take? On the journal's published 2021–2025 averages: about 16 days to a first editorial decision, 105 days to a first post-review decision, and 52 days from acceptance to online publication; its acceptance rate in that period was 40 per cent.