SHAW

About SHAW

SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies — Journal Profile

SHAW — in full, SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies — is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by Penn State University Press in the United States, devoted entirely to the life, work and world of the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950). It is the official publication of the International Shaw Society, and it is the longest-running journal in its single-author field: the periodical line behind it reaches back to 1951, and the journal has carried the title SHAW since 1981. Its identifiers are print ISSN 0741-5842 and electronic ISSN 1529-1480, the pair carried on this JournalsWorld record. The stored record titles the post simply "SHAW"; that is the journal's own short title and the name on its cover, but readers searching catalogues should know the full title above, under which libraries and the publisher also list it. For Shaw scholars — and for the much wider circle of theatre historians, modernists and Irish-studies scholars who work on Shaw's century — this is the field's home journal: its articles, reviews and continuing bibliography define the state of Shaw studies from issue to issue.

At a Glance

• Full title: SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies (short title: SHAW)
• Publisher: Penn State University Press, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States
• Print ISSN: 0741-5842
• Electronic ISSN: 1529-1480
• Journal lineage: Bulletin (Shaw Society of America) 1951–1958; The Shaw Review 1959–1980; SHAW from 1981
• Frequency: two issues per year
• Language: English
• Field: Bernard Shaw studies — literature, theatre and performance, and the history and culture of Shaw's era
• Society: official publication of the International Shaw Society
• Editor: Christopher Wixson (Eastern Illinois University), per the publisher's current journal page
• Access model: subscription journal; current issues through the Scholarly Publishing Collective and Project MUSE, back content on JSTOR
• Website: psupress.org (journals section)

Identity and Publication History

SHAW's history is the history of organised Shaw scholarship in North America. The line begins in 1951 with the Bulletin of the Shaw Society of America, the society journal of the American Shaw circle, which ran to 1958. In 1959 the periodical was relaunched as The Shaw Review, the name under which it published through 1980 and established itself as the record of a fast-professionalising field — the decades in which Shaw studies acquired its scholarly editions, its bibliographies and its academic conferences. In 1981 the journal took the single-word title SHAW and the subtitle The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies, published from then on by Penn State University Press, the university press of Pennsylvania State University at University Park. The volume numbering of the modern journal counts from that relaunch: volume 29 appeared in 2009, volume 35 in 2015, volume 40 in 2020 and volume 44 in 2024, an unbroken annual-then-biannual sequence of more than four decades under one press.

Two changes inside that sequence matter for readers using the archive. First, frequency: as an "Annual" the journal appeared once a year, but by the middle of the 2010s it had moved to two issues a year — volume 35 (2015) and volume 36 (2016) each carry a No. 1 and a No. 2 — and its front matter of the period already describes it as published biannually; current listings likewise give two issues per year. The retitling from Annual to Journal belongs to the same change: the publisher's current page lists the journal as SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies, and the society describes it under that name as its official publication. Second, editorship: the journal's long-serving general editor of the late annual and early journal era was Michel W. Pharand, whose name stands on the title pages of the volumes of the 2000s and 2010s, who co-edited and then edited the journal across that span (his own curriculum vitae dates his general editorship 2009–2016, after a co-editorship from 2006), and who remains on the editorial board today. The publisher's current page names Christopher Wixson of Eastern Illinois University as editor, with Brigitte Bogar as associate editor and Miguel Cisneros Perales as the journal's bibliographer — the officer responsible for the continuing checklist described below. Guest-edited special issues punctuate the run, among them "Shaw and New Media" (volume 40, no. 1, guest edited by Jennifer Buckley) and an issue on Shaw and the Irish literary tradition, and they show the journal's habit of handing its platform to the scholars pushing a topic.

The sponsorship line in the journal's front matter records the other half of its identity: publication of SHAW is made possible in part through the sponsorship of the International Shaw Society, the worldwide society for those interested in the life, times, works and career of Shaw and his circle, and the press's current page calls the journal the society's official publication. That society link is not decorative. It ties the journal to the society's conferences, its membership and its mission to promote interest in Shaw worldwide, and it explains features of the journal — its notices, its bibliography, its reviews of productions and editions — that a free-standing commercial journal would be unlikely to sustain.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The journal's note to contributors, printed in its front matter across many volumes, states its perspective in terms no summary improves on: SHAW's perspective is Bernard Shaw and his milieu. As the subtitle of a Shaw biography — "his life, work, and friends" — indicates, the editors argue, it is impossible to study the life, thought and work of a major literary figure in a vacuum; issues and people, economics, politics, religion, theatre, and literature and journalism — the entirety of the two half centuries Shaw's life spanned — were his assumed province. The journal therefore welcomes articles that either explicitly or implicitly add to, or alter, our understanding of Shaw and his milieu. In practice that admits a wide spread of work under a single test of relevance: studies of individual plays from the early Widowers' Houses to the late political extravaganzas; Shaw's criticism, novels, letters and non-dramatic prose; his music and theatre criticism; his politics, from Fabian socialism to his controversial later positions; his relationships with actors, managers, translators and fellow writers; the production and reception history of the plays on stage and screen; editions and textual questions; and the continuing checklist of Shaviana, the journal's running bibliography of new Shaw publications, which has made each issue a reference tool as well as a collection of essays.

The contents of a representative recent volume show the spread concretely. Volume 44, no. 1 (May 2024) carries, alongside its introduction and reviews, articles on Victorian Shaw, on subverting the melodramatic in The Devil's Disciple, on George Eliot, Bernard Shaw and their doctors' dilemmas in The Doctor's Dilemma, and on water supply and the hygiene of the poorest in Pygmalion — literary, theatrical, medical-historical and social-historical Shaw between two covers. Earlier volumes range just as widely: Shaw and Shakespeare, Shaw and music, Shaw in China, Shaw and Ireland, Shaw and the First World War, Shaw and modernism. The reviews section is a working part of the journal, assessing new editions of the plays and letters, biographies and critical books; and many issues close with contributors' notes and society notices. A single-author journal lives or dies by whether its author can sustain this variety, and Shaw — author of more than sixty plays, as the publisher's page notes, winner of both a Nobel Prize for Literature and an Academy Award for Pygmalion, and a public intellectual in five decades of controversies — has sustained it for over seventy years of continuous periodical publication.

Editorial Leadership and Peer Review

The editorial structure on the publisher's current page is compact: an editor, an associate editor, a bibliographer, and an editorial board of roughly two dozen Shaw scholars drawn from universities in the United States, Canada, Ireland, the United Kingdom and Spain — among them Leonard Conolly, Richard F. Dietrich, Bernard Dukore, Peter Gahan, Nicholas Grene, Brad Kent, Audrey McNamara, Sally Peters, Michel W. Pharand, Jean Reynolds and E. Ann Saddlemyer, names that between them cover most of the field's senior generation. The board's composition is itself information for authors: this is a journal edited from inside a small, expert, international community, and manuscripts are handled by people who work on Shaw professionally. The journal's older front matter directs contributors to submit manuscripts as Word documents through the press's submission route; authors should follow the publisher's current journal page for the live submission instructions, since the route has been carried on the press and Scholarly Publishing Collective platforms in recent years. Quotations from Shaw's published writings are used in the journal with the permission of the Estate of Bernard Shaw, a rights line printed in every volume and a reminder that Shaw textual material has an estate whose permissions the journal manages centrally — one more service the society journal performs for its field.

Publishing Model, Frequency and Access

SHAW appears twice a year from Penn State University Press, a university press that is a member of the Association of University Presses, and it is a subscription journal. The publisher directs readers to current issues through the Scholarly Publishing Collective and Project MUSE, and to back content on JSTOR, where the journal's archive is held under its print ISSN; libraries are the journal's main subscribers, and individual access typically comes through a library's MUSE or JSTOR entitlement or through International Shaw Society membership channels. No article processing charge for the ordinary route is published on the pages fetched for this profile, and no fee figure is therefore stated here: authors should treat any charge question as one to settle from the publisher's current instructions, since this profile reports only what it verified. A search of the Directory of Open Access Journals by the journal's ISSNs at the time of checking returned no listing, which matches the subscription model. Print has not disappeared: the journal's volumes are printed in the United States on acid-free paper meeting the national standard for permanence of paper for printed library material, as its front matter states — a small, telling detail for a journal whose back run is a permanent part of research libraries' Shaw holdings.

Metrics and Standing

Single-author journals defeat most citation metrics, and SHAW's numbers should be read in that light; this profile reports them with their sources so that readers can weigh them properly. Resolving the journal's ISSNs through the OpenAlex sources endpoint at the time of checking returned the source record S4210197727, crediting the Shaw periodical line with 1,100 works and 605 citations, an h-index of 8 and an i10-index of 5, with a two-year mean citedness of about 0.03. That record reaches back across the title's variant names, which is why its work count is large: it aggregates the long back run of Shaw scholarship, most of it cited, if at all, inside a small specialist literature. The Scopus-based picture in SCImago-derived listings is narrower and more recent: SJR 0.1, a best quartile of Q4 in Literature and Literary Theory, a Scopus h-index of 5, and Scopus coverage from 2010. The stored JournalsWorld record gives an h-index of 6, between the two. None of these figures measures what the journal is for. In a field with one dedicated journal, the meaningful indicators are continuity, society backing, library holdings on JSTOR and MUSE, and the journal's role as the field's bibliography of record — and on those indicators SHAW's standing is not in question. Authors in institutions that require Scopus-quartile venues should nonetheless note the Q4 classification honestly, as this profile does, rather than discover it later.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal's presence in Scopus is established by its SCImago record, and its digital availability is anchored by JSTOR for back content and by Project MUSE and the Scholarly Publishing Collective for current issues, per the publisher's journal page. Its catalogue identity is stable and old: the print ISSN is registered with a Library of Congress catalogue record and an OCLC number (7556559) that long predate the web, and the JSTOR archive is keyed to the same print ISSN. For discoverability inside the field, the journal's own apparatus matters as much as any database: the continuing checklist of Shaviana sweeps new Shaw publications into each issue, the reviews cover new editions as they appear, and the society's channels announce contents to exactly the readers most likely to cite them. A scholar entering Shaw studies from theatre history or Irish studies will generally find the field by finding this journal first.

How to Submit

Prospective authors should start from the publisher's current journal page for SHAW, which carries the live submission route and the editorial contacts, and prepare the manuscript as the journal's contributor guidance directs — historically, submission as a Word document through the press's system. The substantive guidance is the scope statement itself: the work must add to or alter understanding of Shaw and his milieu, explicitly or implicitly; a paper on Shaw's period that never engages Shaw will fit better elsewhere, while a paper on any of the milieu's large territories — its theatre, politics, religion, economics, journalism — is in scope when the Shavian connection is real and argued. Authors should expect the conventions of a society journal: engagement with the journal's own back run and its checklist is noticed, new editions and archival material are valued, and reviews are handled through the editor rather than offered unsolicited at length. Scholars new to the field should also look at the International Shaw Society itself, whose sponsorship sustains the journal and whose conferences are where much of its future contents are first heard.

Similar and Related Journals

There is no second journal devoted to Shaw, so comparison runs to neighbours rather than rivals. For the modern-drama territory around Shaw, scholars also publish in Modern Drama, Theatre Journal and New Theatre Quarterly; for Shaw's place in the literary culture of his period, ELT: English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 — a journal on whose advisory board SHAW's former editor also sat — is a frequent alternative, as is the Journal of Modern Literature for modernist framings. Irish-studies readings of Shaw appear in Irish studies journals, and production-focused work in theatre and performance titles. What none of those venues offers is SHAW's combination: an audience composed entirely of the author's specialists, a bibliography that records the work permanently in the field's own checklist, and a reviews culture keyed to Shaw editions and productions. Authors choose SHAW when the contribution is to Shaw studies itself; they choose the neighbours when Shaw is the case study for a question owned by another field.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the full title of SHAW?
SHAW: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies. Earlier subtitles include The Annual of Bernard Shaw Studies; the stored record on this site uses the short title SHAW.

What are SHAW's ISSNs?
Print ISSN 0741-5842 and electronic ISSN 1529-1480, both carried on this record and confirmed in the journal's front matter and the publisher's issue pages.

Who publishes SHAW, and whose journal is it?
Penn State University Press publishes it; it is the official publication of the International Shaw Society, whose sponsorship supports it. The stored record's publisher field shows a numeric internal code; the publisher of record is Penn State University Press.

How old is the journal?
The periodical line begins with the Bulletin of the Shaw Society of America in 1951, continued as The Shaw Review from 1959 to 1980, and has appeared as SHAW since 1981 — volume 44 appeared in 2024. The stored record's 2010 start date is a Scopus coverage window, not the journal's age.

How often does SHAW appear, and who edits it?
Two issues a year. The publisher's current page names Christopher Wixson of Eastern Illinois University as editor, Brigitte Bogar as associate editor and Miguel Cisneros Perales as bibliographer; Michel W. Pharand, the long-serving earlier editor, sits on the editorial board.

Where can I read it?
Current issues through the Scholarly Publishing Collective and Project MUSE, back content on JSTOR, and in print in research libraries. It is a subscription journal; no DOAJ listing was returned for its ISSNs at the time of checking.

What are its citation metrics?
At the time of checking, OpenAlex credited the periodical line with 1,100 works, 605 citations and an h-index of 8; SCImago's Scopus-based listing gave SJR 0.1, Q4 in Literature and Literary Theory and a Scopus h-index of 5. In a single-author field these figures understate the journal's centrality, for the reasons given in the metrics section.