Romanic Review

About Romanic Review

Romanic Review — Journal Profile

Romanic Review is one of the oldest continuously published journals of Romance literatures in the English-speaking world. Founded in 1910 by Henry Alfred Todd, it is published by the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University, in cooperation with Columbia's Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and its Department of Italian, with Duke University Press handling publication and distribution. It appears three times a year, balances special thematic issues with regular unsolicited issues, and covers all periods of French, Italian and Ibero-Romance languages and literature, welcoming a broad diversity of critical approaches. In a field where many journals are younger than their editors, a journal that has been appearing since 1910 — and whose current volume, per Duke University Press, is Volume 117 — carries an archive that is itself part of the history of Romance studies.

The stored Journals World record for this post gives the title Romanic Review, the slug romanic-review, the country United States, a single ISSN, 0035-8118, and an H-index of 8. Its stored publisher field holds only a numeric code, 323, which is a data-entry artefact rather than a publisher name, and it omits the electronic ISSN. The corrected record, from Duke University Press's journal page and Columbia's own pages, is: print ISSN 0035-8118, e-ISSN 2688-5220; published by Columbia's Department of French and Romance Philology with its partner departments, through Duke University Press; editor Elisabeth Ladenson, managing editor Heidi Holst-Knudsen, both at Columbia. This profile works from that corrected record and attributes every metric to the database that produced it.

Identity and Bibliographic Record

History and Development

Romanic Review was founded in 1910 by Henry Alfred Todd, one of the founding figures of Romance philology in the United States, at Columbia University. The early journal described itself, in wording preserved in library catalogue records, as a quarterly journal devoted to research, the publication of texts and documents, critical discussions, notes, news and comment in the field of the Romance languages and literatures. That founding remit — research articles plus texts, documents and professional news — reflects the philological culture of its era, when editing a text and arguing about its language were central scholarly acts and a journal was also a bulletin for the discipline.

Over the following century the journal's centre moved, as the discipline's did, from philology toward literary and cultural criticism, while its institutional base stayed at Columbia. Duke University Press's current description is careful about that base: the journal is published by the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia in cooperation with the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and the Department of Italian. That three-department structure explains the journal's stated coverage — French, Italian and Ibero-Romance — and its ability to run thematic issues that cross those fields. Recent issue themes visible on the publisher's page, such as colonial alterity in literature, translation and travel and microhistory in Ibero-America, Iberian materialities, and literature and medicine in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, show a journal that uses the special issue as its main instrument: a guest-framed conversation on a defined problem, set beside regular unsolicited articles.

The journal's rhythm is now three issues a year, and its scale is that of a mature humanities quarterly-turned-triannual: more than a century of volumes, an archive distributed digitally through Duke University Press's reading platform, and a subscription price listed by the Press at $55 for the journal page's subscribe offer. Its longevity also means its back run is a research resource in itself: scholars tracing how a text, an author or a critical debate was treated across the twentieth century will find Romanic Review cited in the older literature of almost every Romance field it covers.

Scope and Critical Approaches

Duke University Press states the scope plainly: the journal is devoted to the study of Romance literatures; it covers all periods of French, Italian and Ibero-Romance languages and literature; and it welcomes a broad diversity of critical approaches. All periods is a real commitment — the journal's issue themes range from medieval and Renaissance material to contemporary work — and the phrase languages and literature keeps the door open to work in which linguistic and literary questions meet, the journal's philological inheritance.

In practice, fit is judged article by article. A submission should be a self-contained critical study of French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese or Catalan-language material (the Ibero-Romance coverage), or of the literatures written in those languages in Europe, the Americas and elsewhere, and it should make its critical approach visible rather than implied. The journal publishes special thematic issues alongside regular unsolicited issues, so authors have two routes in: answering a themed call, where fit is judged against the theme, or submitting to a regular issue, where the article must justify itself against the whole field. Work that is purely bibliographical without argument, purely linguistic without literary or cultural bearing, or addressed to a single national curriculum debate, sits at the edge of the stated remit and should be discussed with the editorial office before submission if in doubt.

Languages of submission are addressed in the journal's own style guidance, which Columbia publishes as a style sheet with separate, detailed norms for English-language and French-language submissions — including French typographical conventions for articles in French. That bilingual apparatus is part of the journal's identity: it is an American journal that expects to receive and publish scholarship written in the languages it studies, and its style sheet's attention to French conventions, quotation marks and capitalisation is a practical sign of that expectation.

Editorial Structure

The Duke University Press masthead names Elisabeth Ladenson of Columbia University as editor and Heidi Holst-Knudsen as managing editor, with the editorial office in Columbia's Department of French in New York. The editorial board listed by the Press is Columbia-centred: Teodolinda Barolini, Bruno Bosteels, Antoine Compagnon, Jonathan Crary, Nicholas Dames, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Madeleine Dobie, Thomas Dodman, Kathy Eden, Pierre Force, Aubrey Gabel, Graciela Montaldo, Emmanuelle Saada, Joanna Stalnaker, Hannah Weaver and Eliza Zingesser of Columbia, with Caroline Weber of Barnard College.

Beyond that sits a large international advisory board, which the Press lists as including Jean-Baptiste Amadieu, Roberto Antonelli, David Caron, Matei Chihaia, Andrew Counter, Pierino Gallo, Noah Guynn, Davis Ivan Jablonka, Jean-Louis Jeannelle, Ann Jefferson, Michael Lucey, Judith Lyon-Caen, John D. Lyons, Marielle Macé, William Marx, Peggy McCracken, Lola Badia Pàmies, Thomas Pavel, Paolo Pellegrini, Lino Pertile, Gilles Philippe, Julia Prest, Elena Russo, Maurice Samuels, Anne Simon, Wayne Storey, Richard Trachsler, Anita Traninger, Éric Trudel, Kate Tunstall, Nicholas White and Oumelbanine Nina Zhiri, drawn from universities in France, Italy, Spain, Germany, Britain, Switzerland and the United States. That two-tier structure — a working editorial board at the home institution and an advisory board spanning the field internationally — is the standard governance of a journal of this age and standing, and it matches the journal's double-blind process: manuscripts are judged by readers who are not the author's institutional colleagues, with identifying references removed.

Metrics and Indexing — With Sources

Indexing is where Romanic Review's record is unusually well documented, because Duke University Press publishes the full list. The Press states the journal is indexed or abstracted in, among others, Scopus; Web of Science; MLA International Bibliography; ERIH PLUS (the European Reference Index for the Humanities); Academic Search Complete, Elite, Premier and Alumni Edition; Humanities International Complete and Humanities International Index; Humanities Source and Humanities Source Ultimate; IBZ; Periodicals Index Online; ProQuest Central and the Research Library; Literary Reference Center; and the H. W. Wilson humanities and social-science indexes and retrospectives. For an author whose institution counts Scopus or Web of Science coverage, the Press's list — not a secondary aggregator's summary — is the text to cite, and it should be re-checked at the time of submission because index lists change.

Citation metrics must be kept attributed, because the databases disagree. The stored Journals World template text gives an H-index of 8 and Q4 positioning with coverage described as 2000 and 2002–2025; read that as the imported SCImago-derived snapshot behind this site's record. OpenAlex, resolved first through its ISSN endpoint for 0035-8118 to source S2764570150, counts from its own corpus 1,265 works and 1,961 citations, with an h-index of 18, an i10-index of 35 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.088. Its host organisation is given as Columbia University Press, reflecting the journal's historical publishing line, and its topic clusters are dominated by French literature: French Literature and Criticism (777 works), French Literature and Critical Theory (586), French Literature and Poetry (373), Renaissance Literature and Culture (121) and Medieval Literature and History (111). The gap between an h-index of 8 in one system and 18 in another is normal for a century-old humanities journal, whose early decades are unevenly digitised; neither number should be quoted without its source. No Clarivate Journal Impact Factor was verified from a source fetched for this profile, and no APC is published by the Press for this subscription journal; any fee figure attributed to Romanic Review elsewhere should be treated as could not be verified.

A DOAJ check for this profile, using the DOAJ search API for ISSN 0035-8118, returned no results. That is consistent with the journal's subscription model through Duke University Press: access is by individual or institutional subscription, with online reading on the Press's platform for subscribers and institutions with electronic access.

How to Submit

Duke University Press's guidance is specific, and authors should follow it literally. The Romanic Review does not accept submissions sent by postal mail. Submit the article, with a separate abstract as a Word file, by email attachment to the journal's submission address at Columbia, romanicpub@columbia.edu. Review is double-blind, so ensure no self-identifying references appear in the article or the abstract; identifying information belongs in the covering email, not in the manuscript.

Format: article submissions of about 25 pages, double-spaced, in Times New Roman 12 point, complying with the journal's style guide. Manuscripts must include a 150-word abstract at the beginning of the document and a list of three to five keywords stating the precise content of the manuscript. The Columbia style sheet adds the house rules in detail: for English, MLA guidelines for in-text parenthetical references with a Works Cited list, footnotes reserved for short explanations and kept to a minimum, and Chicago Manual of Style norms for grammar, punctuation and capitalisation; for French, the typographical norms of the French national printing tradition, with the sheet's worked examples for titles, quotation marks and accents. Figures, tables and images go in separate files, at the resolutions the Press's art guidelines specify, with source files supplied; authors are responsible for obtaining permissions for previously published illustrations, tables, figures or lengthy quotations, and for any permissions fees and any print colour costs, while supplied colour figures appear in colour online at no cost. Before submitting, read recent issues — including the themed issues — to judge whether your article's conversation is one the journal is currently hosting, and if your piece was written for a themed call, say so in the covering email.

Is Romanic Review Right for Your Work?

Choose Romanic Review when the article is a substantial critical study — the roughly 25-page format is longer than a notes journal allows — in French, Italian or Ibero-Romance literature of any period, and when the author wants the readership and the indexing record of a century-old Columbia journal published by Duke University Press. It suits theoretically explicit work, comparative work across the Romance fields its three sponsoring departments cover, and work that can hold its own in a themed issue beside commissioned pieces. It is a weaker fit for very short notes, for editions and documents without a critical argument, for Romance linguistics with no literary bearing, and for authors who need a fast decision: established journals with double-blind review and themed-issue planning work to academic rhythms, and the Press publishes no decision-time promise on the pages checked for this profile, so any timeline claim for this journal is not publicly disclosed on those pages and should be asked of the editorial office directly.

Similar Journals

The closest comparisons are Romance Notes, the Chapel Hill triannual covered in this batch (post 36891), which takes shorter articles across the same four-language field; French Studies and French Forum for French-centred work; Italica and Forum Italicum for Italian; Hispanic Review and Revista de Estudios Hispánicos for Ibero-Romance material; and, for the French nineteenth century in French, Romantisme (post 36893). Salmagundi (post 36894) offers the contrasting case in this batch: a literary quarterly for the general reader rather than a specialist scholarly journal. Comparing article length, language policy and review model across those profiles is the fastest way to place a manuscript correctly the first time.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Romanic Review? Print ISSN 0035-8118, stored on this record and confirmed by Duke University Press; e-ISSN 2688-5220, given on the Press journal page and in the OpenAlex source record.

Who publishes Romanic Review? Columbia University's Department of French and Romance Philology, in cooperation with its Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and Department of Italian, published through Duke University Press. One secondary source describes Duke University Press itself as publisher, and the Press is the distribution and platform partner; the numeric code in the stored publisher field is an artefact, not a name.

When was it founded, and by whom? In 1910, by Henry Alfred Todd, per both the Duke University Press and Columbia University journal pages.

How often does it appear, and what is the current volume? Three issues annually; Duke University Press lists the current volume as Volume 117.

Who edits it? Elisabeth Ladenson is editor and Heidi Holst-Knudsen is managing editor, per the Press masthead checked for this profile.

How do I submit? By email attachment to the Columbia submission address, with a separate abstract in Word format; about 25 double-spaced pages, a 150-word abstract in the document, three to five keywords, and no identifying references, because review is double-blind. Postal submissions are not accepted.

Is it indexed in Scopus and Web of Science? Yes — both appear in the indexer list published by Duke University Press, alongside MLA International Bibliography and ERIH PLUS; re-check that list at submission time.

What are its metrics? Attributed figures only: the stored record carries an H-index of 8; OpenAlex source S2764570150 counts 1,265 works, 1,961 citations and an h-index of 18. The systems count different corpora.

Sources checked for this profile: the live Journals World record for post 36892; the Duke University Press journal page for Romanic Review (founding, publishing departments, frequency, current volume, masthead, submission guidelines, indexer list, ISSN and e-ISSN); Columbia University French department journal and style-sheet pages found in search (founding by Henry Alfred Todd in 1910, editor names, English and French style rules); OpenAlex via its ISSN endpoint for 0035-8118, source S2764570150; and the DOAJ search API for ISSN 0035-8118, which returned no results in the check made for this profile. Anything not found on those pages is stated as not published, not publicly disclosed or could not be verified rather than estimated.