Rocznik Teologii Katolickiej

About Rocznik Teologii Katolickiej

Rocznik Teologii Katolickiej: The Catholic Theology Annual from Białystok

Rocznik Teologii Katolickiej, translated on its own website as the Catholic Theology Annual, is an academic journal of theology published annually in Białystok, Poland. Its print ISSN is 1644-8855 and its online ISSN is 2956-4689. It is published by the Chair (Department) of Catholic Theology of the University of Białystok, with the University of Białystok publishing house as its publisher of record, and its articles carry DOIs under the prefix 10.15290/rtk. The journal's own description is precise about its character: it disseminates the results of research in the field of theology, and of research arising from dialogue with other sciences at a meta-theological level. That second clause is not decoration. It defines a journal that expects theology to talk with neighbouring disciplines, and it shapes the contents described below.

For international readers, three facts from the journal's own About page organise everything else. The journal is published annually. Its texts are published only in English. And since 2023 it has been available in digital form, with its current platform at rtk.uwb.edu.pl. A Polish theology annual that publishes only in English is making a deliberate choice about audience: it is written in Poland, rooted in a Polish university chair and a Polish scholarly community, but addressed to an international readership of theologians rather than only to a domestic one.

Identity and Identifiers, Checked

The identifiers above are taken from the journal itself. Its About page gives the ISSN for the printed version as 1644-8855 and the online ISSN as 2956-4689, and a recent issue masthead repeats both numbers together with the DOI prefix. OpenAlex, retrieved by ISSN for this profile and verified again by a direct fetch of the source record, lists the same ISSN pair, gives the host organisation as the University of Białystok, the country as Poland, and the journal's own site as its homepage. The older Journals World record for this post listed only the print ISSN. The online ISSN 2956-4689 is a genuine second identifier, belonging to the digital edition that the journal says has existed since 2023, and any complete record of this title should carry both.

The publisher field in the raw Journals World record appears as a numeric term identifier; the taxonomy label behind it is the Department of Catholic Theology, University of Białystok. That matches the journal's own account. Its masthead gives the editorial address as the University of Białystok, Chair of Catholic Theology, 15-435 Białystok, ul. Ludwika Zamenhofa 15, with the chair's email at the university domain, and names the University of Białystok publishing house in Białystok as publisher. An older issue gave the chair's address at ul. Warszawska 50 in Białystok. Addresses for a university chair can change when a unit moves, and authors should use the address on the current journal website for correspondence rather than copying an address from any single issue, including the ones cited here.

A Journal with a Long Annual Rhythm

Annual journals live by a different rhythm from quarterlies, and this one's archive shows the pattern clearly. Its volumes are numbered in Roman numerals as tomes: volume XV appeared in 2016, with a second part that year devoted in part to catechetics, and volume XXII appeared in 2023. A numbering sequence that reaches its twenty-second tome in 2023 points to a title with more than two decades of annual publication behind it, even though selective international indexes began covering it much more recently. Secondary summaries of Scopus-derived data give coverage beginning in 2019. As with many Central European humanities journals, that date marks the start of a particular index's coverage, not the journal's birth, and readers who copy 2019 into a biographical note about the journal would be understating its history by many years.

The repository of the University of Białystok preserves the journal's recent tomes, and the 2022 volume shows the kind of community the journal serves. Alongside research articles it carried a report on the activity of the Chair of Catholic Theology for the academic year, and articles on topics ranging from the epistemological bases of a Marian dogma to John Paul II's account of human freedom, the family in Polish legislation past and present, the psychological maturity of young people for marriage as a predictor in family law, and the legacy of Blessed Michał Sopoćko. That mixture — dogmatic and fundamental theology, moral and pastoral questions, family studies, law and history, all within one annual volume — is the journal's signature.

The journal also maintains the public responsibilities that come with a long archive. In June 2024 its homepage carried a formal announcement, signed by the editor-in-chief, retracting a published paper because of a false declaration of co-authorship and a violation of ethical publication standards, and naming the paper concerned. Whatever the circumstances of that case, the form of the response matters for a profile of this kind: the retraction was public, dated, specific about the reason, and issued in the editor's own name. That is how a journal is expected to handle a serious authorship problem, and its presence in the record should be read as evidence of a functioning editorial ethics practice, not hidden away.

Scope: Theology in Its Various Areas

The About page states that the journal contains articles from various areas of theology, and seeks to disseminate the latest studies and projects both of scholars in the field and of those who cooperate with the Chair of Catholic Theology. In practice, the areas visible in its contents and in the expertise of its board include dogmatic theology, fundamental theology, moral theology and bioethics, pastoral theology, catechetics, Mariology, spirituality, church history, and the theology of the family. The journal's editor-in-chief is himself a dogmatic theologian whose own published work in the journal includes a study of the epistemological bases of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which gives a sense of the scholarly centre of the title.

Family and marriage form a particularly visible strand. The 2022 tome alone contained multiple studies of the family in Polish law, of parents' and children's relationships under successive family codes, of the functions of a spouse's consent in matrimonial property law, and of psychological maturity for marriage. A reader who knows that one of the journal's senior figures works in family studies will not be surprised. For authors, the practical point is that work on marriage, family, upbringing and education, treated theologically or at the meeting point of theology, law and psychology, has an established place in this journal and an established readership.

Scope: Dialogue with Other Sciences, at a Meta-Theological Level

The journal describes its research and scholarly work as reflected in articles that combine ethical, social and religious issues in their intercultural conditions, and says that it serves the purpose of sharing the results of cooperation with scholarly communities in Poland and abroad. The phrase about dialogue with other sciences at a meta-theological level deserves slow reading. It does not mean that the journal publishes general science, or general social science. It means that it welcomes work in which theology reflects on its own relations with other disciplines — with philosophy, history, law, psychology, pedagogy and the natural sciences — and work in which those disciplines' findings pose questions that theology must answer. The retracted paper mentioned above, whatever its authorship fault, was itself an attempt at that border, addressing a question about divine power in relation to a principle of physics. The border is active; the journal's handling of that case shows that it is also policed.

Authors from neighbouring disciplines should therefore frame submissions carefully. A historical study of a religious institution, a legal study of family provisions, or a psychological study of religious maturity will fit this journal when its theological significance is made explicit and argued, not merely asserted in a concluding sentence. Conversely, theologians submitting here should expect readers from those neighbouring fields and should present the non-theological material in their papers — legal provisions, historical evidence, psychological constructs — to the standard those fields expect.

Editorial Leadership and Board

A recent issue masthead names the editor-in-chief as Rev. Andrzej Proniewski, professor at the University of Białystok, and the managing editor, or secretary, as Rev. Leszek Marius Jakoniuk. Proniewski also chairs the Department of Catholic Theology at the university, directs the Theology Studium in Białystok, and edits a companion title in dogmatic theology, according to his author biography on the journal site, where his ORCID identifier is also given. Continuity of editorship by the chair's head is typical of a university-chair journal, and it explains the close fit between the journal's contents and the chair's research life, including the annual report of the chair's activity carried in the journal.

The editorial board listed in the masthead is international in a specific, theological sense. Its members are based in Rome, Lugano, Yaoundé, New Delhi, Opole, Kaunas and Vilnius, Maynooth in Ireland, Kraków, Lublin, Paris, Warsaw and Wrocław, among other places. That is a map of Catholic theological institutions — pontifical universities, faculties of theology and seminaries — rather than a general academic map, and it tells an author exactly which conversation the journal belongs to. The board includes figures in dogmatics, fundamental theology, moral theology and bioethics, including a board member known internationally for work in bioethics and Catholic moral teaching. The journal's reviewer list, printed in the same masthead, is even wider, extending to scholars in the United States and across Europe, which is consistent with a journal that publishes only in English and recruits referees internationally for its annual tome.

Language, Frequency and Form

The journal is published annually, and its texts are published only in English — a point the About page states without qualification. Polish authors therefore publish here in English, and international authors face no translation barrier in reading the journal. Since 2023 the journal has been available in digital form through its own platform, where readers can browse issues and articles and where announcements, author information and reviewer information are maintained. Some pages describe the digital availability slightly differently — one version of the About text says the journal is available in digital form, another that it is available both in print and digitally — so the careful statement is that a print edition identified by the print ISSN continues to be recorded alongside the online edition identified by the online ISSN, and the digital platform is the reliable route to current contents.

Authors interested in submitting are directed by the journal's own homepage to review the About page for section policies and the Author Guidelines, and to register with the journal before submitting, or to log in if already registered and begin the submission process the platform provides. Registration-based submission through a journal platform is standard practice; authors should register with an institutional email address they will keep, because an annual journal's timetable means correspondence about a submission may extend over many months.

Indexing and Standing in Poland

The journal states on its own pages that it is in the international Scopus database, in capital letters in the original — a point of evident pride — and a recent masthead lists its indexing in full: Scopus, ERIH PLUS, Index Copernicus, CEJSH, BazHum, EBSCO, Polska Bibliografia Naukowa (the Polish Scholarly Bibliography), POL-index, the ICI Journals Master List and CiteFactor. The journal's homepage adds CEEOL, the Central and Eastern European Online Library, to the services through which it can be found. These services are of different kinds — selective citation indexes, regional humanities indexes, library databases and journal lists — and a careful author will distinguish them. Scopus and ERIH PLUS are the entries that carry the most weight in most evaluation systems; CEJSH, BazHum, CEEOL and the Polish national bibliography are the entries that make the journal discoverable to its regional scholarly community.

Within Poland, the journal also carries a ministerial score. Its About page reports that it received a score of 200 points in 2023, described there as the highest score, and 40 points in 2024, on the list of the Ministry of Education and Science. Those two numbers look contradictory until their context is understood: ministerial lists and their scoring scales are revised, and a journal's points can change sharply between list editions without any change in the journal itself. Both figures are reported here exactly as the journal reports them, with their years. A Polish author who needs the current score should consult the current ministerial list, not this profile and not the journal's older pages, because it is the list in force at the time of evaluation that will be applied.

Metrics, Read Honestly

Secondary services summarising SCImago data place the journal in History, Philosophy and Religious Studies, with Education also appearing, and give category quartiles in the Q3 to Q4 range, an SJR reported as 0.114 in one summary and 0.153 for a later year in another, and a Scopus-based h-index of 2. The Journals World record labels this post Q2. That label does not match the category quartiles in the SCImago-based summaries consulted, and it should be treated as a filing label on the older record rather than as a verified quartile. Authors who need a quartile should take the category-specific figure, for their required year, from SCImago directly.

OpenAlex tells a different and, for this journal, more complete story about volume. Retrieved by ISSN and verified by a direct fetch of its source record (S4210182944) for this profile, OpenAlex counts 750 works and 382 citations for this source, with a summary h-index of 7, an i10-index of 4 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.07. The large works count, compared with the short Scopus coverage window, reflects OpenAlex's retrospective inclusion of the journal's longer back archive — the two decades of annual tomes described above — rather than an error. The low mean citedness is equally informative and should not be dressed up: theology is a slow-citing field, annual publication slows citation further, and many of the journal's readers use its articles in teaching, ministry formation and scholarship that does not always register in citation indexes. The honest summary is that this is an established, indexed, long-running theology annual with modest citation metrics, whose standing rests on its Scopus presence, its ministerial recognition in Poland, and its place in its scholarly community.

The journal was searched in the Directory of Open Access Journals by both of its ISSNs for this profile, and no DOAJ record was returned. Its articles are reachable through its own platform, but authors whose funders require a DOAJ-listed venue should note the position and check it again at submission.

How to Submit, and What to Expect

Begin with the journal's platform: read the About page and the Author Guidelines, register, and submit through the process the platform sets out. Write in English to a publishable standard before submission; because the journal publishes only in English and draws its board and referees internationally, a manuscript that needs extensive language work places a burden on a small editorial office and risks rejection for presentation rather than content. A recent masthead names a proofreader, a Polish language editor, a layout editor and a cover designer among its production roles — evidence of a real production process — but that process is for accepted papers, not a substitute for a carefully prepared submission.

Shape the paper for an annual. An annual tome cannot react to a fast-moving debate, and its articles are expected to remain useful for years. Prefer questions of durable significance, give full references to primary sources and to the international literature as well as to Polish scholarship, and make the paper self-contained: a reader who finds it in the university repository a decade later, without the context of the year in which it appeared, should still be able to follow its argument. If the paper arises from the work of the Chair of Catholic Theology or from cooperation with it, that connection is welcome by the journal's own account; if it does not, the paper must stand entirely on its quality and on its fit with the journal's theological and dialogical scope.

Is This Journal Right for Your Paper?

It is a strong fit for theological research in dogmatics, fundamental and moral theology, catechetics, pastoral theology, Mariology and spirituality; for theological work on marriage, family and education; for church history with theological significance; and for carefully framed work at the meeting point of theology with philosophy, law, history, psychology or the natural sciences. It is a particularly sensible choice for a Polish or Central European theologian who wants a Scopus-indexed, English-language, ministerially scored annual rooted in a university chair, and for international theologians who want to enter the conversation that chair sustains.

It is a weak fit for work in religious studies that deliberately brackets all theological commitment and makes no theological argument; for purely empirical social science with no meta-theological dimension; for short responses and topical interventions that need a fast outlet; and for papers whose authors cannot publish in English. It is also the wrong choice if a decision is needed within a few months: an annual journal works to the timetable of its tome, and no review timeline is publicly disclosed in the sources consulted for this profile, so none should be assumed.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does the title mean? Rocznik Teologii Katolickiej is translated by the journal itself as the Catholic Theology Annual.

What are its ISSNs? Print ISSN 1644-8855 and online ISSN 2956-4689. The older short record listed only the print ISSN.

Who publishes it? The Chair of Catholic Theology of the University of Białystok, with the University of Białystok publishing house as publisher, in Białystok, Poland.

Who edits it? A recent masthead names Rev. Andrzej Proniewski as editor-in-chief and Rev. Leszek Marius Jakoniuk as managing editor. Check the current masthead before corresponding.

In what language does it publish? Only in English, according to its About page.

How often does it appear? Annually.

Is it indexed? The journal reports Scopus indexing, along with ERIH PLUS, Index Copernicus, CEJSH, BazHum, EBSCO, the Polish Scholarly Bibliography, POL-index and the ICI Journals Master List, and it is findable through CEEOL. No DOAJ record was returned for either ISSN when searched for this profile.

What are its metrics? OpenAlex, verified directly, counts 750 works, 382 citations and an h-index of 7. SCImago-based summaries give a Scopus-based h-index of 2 and category quartiles in the Q3 to Q4 range. The databases cover different archives; quote the one you use, with its year.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile is grounded in the journal's own website, including its About page and a recent issue masthead, the University of Białystok repository record for a recent tome, and its OpenAlex source record retrieved by ISSN and re-verified by direct source fetch. The DOAJ position was checked by searching the DOAJ interface for both ISSNs. SCImago and ministerial-score information is attributed to the summaries and journal statements from which it comes. Facts not supported by the consulted sources, including any acceptance rate or promised review period, are described as not publicly disclosed rather than estimated.