Sociologus

About Sociologus

Sociologus, published in its current form as Sociologus – Journal for Social Anthropology, is one of the longest-lived journals in German-language social and cultural anthropology. It is published by Duncker & Humblot in Germany, in print and online, and it carries print ISSN 0038-0377 and online ISSN 1865-5106. The publisher describes it as committed to ethnographically grounded social analysis and theory building, assigning centrality to social and cultural processes, and as one of the most important social and cultural anthropological journals in the German-speaking world. For researchers working on cultural diversity, migration, social transformation, religion, kinship, economic life, or the anthropology of the present, it is a specialist venue with a century of history behind it — and, unusually, a journal whose identity was formed twice: once in the Weimar-era birth of modern ethnology, and again in its post-war refounding.

Sociologus at a glance

Identity and history

The history of Sociologus begins in 1925, when the ethnologist Richard Thurnwald founded the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Soziologie. Historical surveys of German sociology record that the journal, founded by Thurnwald together with Bronislaw Malinowski as a leading figure of the new anthropology, was published from 1925 and was renamed Sociologus as of 1932. From 1932 it appeared bilingually, under an extended subtitle describing it as a journal of sociology and social psychology, and its early contributors and co-editors included figures such as William F. Ogburn, Edward Sapir and Pitirim Sorokin — a sign of how international German ethnology still was in those years. That first series did not survive the political catastrophe of the 1930s: reference works on German anthropology note that the older journal of the same name ceased in 1933, and that Sociologus was refounded in 1951.

The refounded journal took the subtitle Zeitschrift für empirische Ethnosoziologie und Ethnopsychologie — journal for empirical ethno-sociology and ethno-psychology — and in English, Journal for Empirical Social Anthropology. The word empirical in that subtitle was a programme, not decoration. Thurnwald's tradition insisted that claims about social life should rest on field observation and documented material rather than on armchair speculation about distant peoples, and that insistence still shapes how the journal presents itself today. The publisher's current description stresses ethnographically grounded analysis and theory building together: field material is expected to do theoretical work, and theoretical argument is expected to stay answerable to field material.

Over the post-war decades the journal became a home for German-speaking ethnology as that discipline rebuilt its institutions, trained new generations, and gradually shifted its centre of gravity from the study of non-European societies as distant objects towards an anthropology that also studies Europe, migration, cities, states and contemporary social change. The journal's pages reflect that wider movement: classic ethnographic topics such as kinship, ritual, exchange and religion sit alongside work on diaspora, borders, development, memory and the social effects of economic and political transformation. A profile of the journal published in recent years describes its coverage as empirical research on cultural diversity, social processes and their transformations, and the contrasting forms of social relations — a concise statement of a remit that has proved durable precisely because it is defined by a method, ethnography, rather than by a single region or topic.

Editorial continuity matters in a journal of this kind. The editor-in-chief from 1999 to 2007 was Erdmute Alber of the University of Bayreuth, and the publisher's current editorial page lists a team anchored at German and Swiss universities. On the page checked for this profile, the editorial team consists of Prof. Dr. Rita Kesselring (St. Gallen) and Prof. Dr. Mirco Göpfert (Frankfurt am Main) as editors, with Prof. Dr. Bettina Beer (Lucerne) and Prof. Dr. Eveline Dürr (Munich) listed to June 2026, Dr. Henry Kammler (Munich) as managing editor, and a wider board including scholars in Bayreuth, Berlin, Halle, Konstanz, Leipzig, Vienna and Zürich, with several further members listed as starting in June 2026. Because editorial teams change, authors should always confirm the current team on the publisher's site before submitting, but the pattern is stable: this is a journal edited by working ethnologists at research universities, not by a commercial editorial office.

The editorial office itself sits in Munich, at the Institut für Ethnologie of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, under the managing editorship based there. That university anchoring is part of the journal's character. Decisions are made close to the discipline, by scholars who themselves publish ethnography, supervise fieldwork-based doctorates and review for neighbouring journals. For authors, the practical consequence is that fit is judged substantively: a manuscript that is competent but not ethnographically grounded is unlikely to be rescued by topical fashion, while a carefully observed study of a less fashionable topic has a genuine chance.

Scope and subjects

The publisher states that Sociologus is open in terms of subject matter, region and discipline, while claiming anthropological relevance based on the present. Those two sentences together define the scope better than any long topic list. First, openness: there is no regional restriction, no list of approved themes, and no requirement that authors be anthropologists by departmental affiliation. Sociologists, historians, political scientists, scholars of religion and development researchers all appear in journals of this tradition, provided their work speaks to anthropological questions. Second, present relevance: the journal wants work that helps readers understand social and cultural processes as they unfold now, even when the material is historical. A study of a nineteenth-century trading network can fit if it illuminates how exchange, trust or cultural translation work; a purely antiquarian piece with no analytical payoff for the present is a weaker fit.

Within that remit, recurring subject areas include:

• Cultural diversity and social relations — how communities organise difference, belonging, hierarchy and coexistence.
• Social processes and their transformations — social change, modernisation and its discontents, post-socialist and post-colonial transitions, and the remaking of institutions.
• Migration, diaspora and transnational life — also reflected in the journal's OpenAlex topic profile, which lists diaspora, migration and transnational identity among its leading topics.
• African studies and ethnography — a long-standing strength in the German ethnological tradition, again visible in the journal's topic profile.
• German and European social life — anthropology at home, including work on German social sciences and history as an object of study.
• Contemporary sociological theory and practice — theory that is built from, and tested against, empirical material.
• Reviews — the journal also contains reviews of books, and of exhibitions and ethnographic films, which makes its review section a useful record of what the discipline is reading and watching.

Authors should notice what this scope excludes. Sociologus is not a general sociology journal in the quantitative sense: survey-based manuscripts without an ethnographic or interpretive dimension belong more naturally in journals such as the leading German general sociology titles, and purely theoretical essays with no empirical anchor belong in theory journals. The journal's comparative advantage, and the reason editors and reviewers will ask hard questions, is the quality of the empirical grounding: fieldnotes, interviews, participant observation, archival ethnography or other documented material that the author has genuinely worked through.

Publisher and publication model

Duncker & Humblot is a Berlin scholarly publisher with a long history in law, economics, history and the social sciences, and it publishes Sociologus in both print and electronic editions. The publisher's journal page states that the journal is internationally referenced, appears online and in print, is listed in the most important indexes, and practises an accompanying and supportive review process. That last phrase deserves attention, because it signals an editorial philosophy: review at Sociologus is presented as a process that works with authors to bring a promising manuscript to publishable form, rather than as a one-round filter. Authors should still expect rigorous criticism — supportive does not mean lenient — but the stated intention is development of manuscripts, and experienced authors in small disciplines value exactly that kind of review.

The journal is a subscription journal rather than an open-access journal: OpenAlex records it as not open access, and the publisher sells print and online access through its own platform. There is no article processing charge listed on the publisher page checked for this profile, and no fee schedule is published there; any charge position should therefore be described as not publicly disclosed, and authors with funder mandates should confirm the journal's self-archiving and rights terms directly with the publisher before submitting. The publisher's author note on its journal page explains the rights model in outline: submission is understood as an offer to transfer the exclusive right of publication to the editor and publisher, authors retain the right to grant permission for publication elsewhere after a minimum of one year, and every reprint must reference the original publication in Sociologus. The journal is archived in Portico, which gives its back content a recognised long-term preservation home.

Metrics and standing — read them by source

Small, bilingual, discipline-specific journals are exactly the titles for which single-number summaries mislead, so the figures below are given with their sources attached, as checked for this profile.

OpenAlex resolves both of the journal's ISSNs to a single source record, S82112148, named Sociologus, with ISSN-L 0038-0377. At the time of checking, that record listed 266 works and 972 citations, a summary h-index of 16, an i10-index of 33, and a two-year mean citedness of 0.25. OpenAlex gave the source's first publication year in its data as 1932 and its last as 2024, and listed its leading topics as anthropological studies, African studies and ethnography, contemporary sociological theory and practice, German social sciences and history, and diaspora, migration and transnational identity. That topic list is a fair map of the journal's centre of gravity. OpenAlex records merge and split over time, so these counts should be read as the state of that record at checking, not as permanent properties of the journal.

SCImago-derived listings tell a lower-number story, as Scopus-based measures usually do for German-language humanities and social science titles. The SCImago-based listing consulted for this profile gave Sociologus an SJR of 0.113, an h-index of 11, a best quartile of Q4 in Social Sciences (miscellaneous), the publisher as Duncker und Humblot GmbH, and Scopus coverage noted as 1982, 1987 and 2008 onwards. A Journal Citation Reports figure sometimes quoted for the journal — an impact factor of 0.133 — dates from 2012 and should not be presented as current. The honest summary is this: by global citation databases the journal is a small-circulation specialist title whose citation counts are modest, in a discipline where influence travels through books, teaching and long-form argument at least as much as through rapid journal citation. Scholars assessing it for promotion or funding purposes should present the source, database and year of any figure they quote, exactly as above, rather than a bare number.

Standing, in this case, is better judged by longevity and by the company the journal keeps: a title founded in 1925, refounded after a dictatorship and a war, still edited from a major university institute and still indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index tradition, Scopus and JSTOR, occupies a stable place in its discipline regardless of quartile arithmetic.

Indexing and discoverability

The publisher lists Sociologus as covered by a long set of services. On the page checked, they included BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine), CARHUS Plus+, Gale / Cengage services, CNKI Scholar, EBSCO Discovery Service, EconBiz and ECONIS (ZBW), ERIH PLUS, Gale Research Complete, GENIOS, Google Scholar, IBR Online and IBZ Online (De Gruyter), the Index to the Study of Religions Online (Brill), J-Gate, JSTOR, NAVER Academic, OpenAlex, ProQuest services, Publons, RISS, Scopus, Sherpa Romeo, Summon, Web of Science, WorldCat and ZORA, with archiving in Portico. A separate journal summary likewise records the journal as abstracted and indexed in the Social Sciences Citation Index. For authors, the practical points are three: the journal is discoverable through the library systems researchers actually use; its European research standing is signalled by ERIH PLUS; and its presence in JSTOR and Portico gives articles a durable afterlife beyond the publisher's own platform. A listing in the Directory of Open Access Journals could not be verified for this journal, which is consistent with its subscription model — authors should not describe it as an open-access title.

How to submit

The publisher states that manuscripts are welcome at any time and will be processed thoroughly and as promptly as possible, and that submissions go to the journal's editorial office — the Redaktion Sociologus at the Institut für Ethnologie, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, in Munich. Articles should be formatted in accordance with the Chicago Manual of Style, author-date variant, a detail worth taking literally: converting a manuscript's referencing to Chicago author-date before submission is a small task that removes a common source of friction. Manuscripts may be written in German or English, the journal's two languages of publication.

A realistic submission workflow looks like this. First, test fit honestly: read two or three recent articles and one review essay, and ask whether your material and argument would sit naturally between them. Second, prepare the manuscript to the journal's stated style, with the ethnographic material presented so that a reader can see how interpretation was built from evidence. Third, submit to the editorial office through the channel shown on the publisher's current journal page, keeping a complete copy of the submitted version and its submission date. Fourth, expect the accompanying review process the publisher describes: reports may ask for reframing, for more context, or for the theoretical claim to be sharpened, and a revised manuscript that engages those reports carefully is the normal route to acceptance. Fifth, on acceptance, note the rights position summarised above — exclusive publication rights transfer, with author re-use elsewhere possible after a minimum of one year and with a reference to the original publication — and make sure any funder or institutional repository requirement is compatible with it before, not after, you sign.

What helps a manuscript here? A clearly located field or corpus; an argument that generalises beyond the case without pretending the case is the world; engagement with the German-language as well as the English-language literature where both exist; and honest treatment of access, consent and positionality, which ethnographic reviewers will look for. What hurts? A literature review in search of data, a case study in search of an argument, and citations that ignore everything not written in English in the last ten years.

Fees, access and reading the journal

No article processing charge, submission fee or page charge is published on the publisher page checked for this profile, so the correct statement is that author-facing charges are not publicly disclosed there, rather than that the journal is free of every possible charge in every circumstance; authors who need certainty for a grant application should ask the editorial office directly. Readers usually reach the journal through a university library subscription to the publisher's platform, through JSTOR, or through interlibrary supply of the print edition. Because the journal is bilingual, readers should also expect that some articles, reviews and editorial material will be in German; abstracts and the publisher's platform are the quickest route to judging the language of a particular item.

Similar and neighbouring journals

Authors weighing Sociologus against neighbouring venues usually compare it with other European ethnology and social anthropology titles rather than with general sociology journals. Natural points of comparison include Anthropos, Paideuma, and Zeitschrift für Ethnologie in the German-language tradition; Social Anthropology and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute in English; and, for more sociologically framed ethnography, general titles in German sociology. The choice among them turns on language, on how theoretical the manuscript's claim is, on regional readership, and on how much development an author wants from review. Sociologus is the natural first consideration when the manuscript is ethnographically grounded, speaks to present social and cultural processes, and would benefit from a readership that spans German-speaking and international anthropology.

Frequently asked questions

What are the ISSNs of Sociologus? Print ISSN 0038-0377 and online ISSN 1865-5106, as listed by the publisher and matched by OpenAlex, which uses 0038-0377 as the ISSN-L.

Who publishes Sociologus? Duncker & Humblot, Germany. The editorial office is at the Institut für Ethnologie of Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.

When was Sociologus founded? It was founded in 1925 by Richard Thurnwald as the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Soziologie, took the name Sociologus in 1932, ceased in its first series in 1933, and was refounded in 1951.

In which languages does Sociologus publish? German and English.

Is Sociologus peer reviewed? Yes. The publisher describes an accompanying and supportive review process, and the journal is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal of social anthropology.

Is Sociologus open access? No. It is a subscription journal published in print and online; OpenAlex records it as not open access. Long-term archiving is in Portico.

What metrics does Sociologus have? By source, at checking: OpenAlex (source S82112148) listed 266 works, 972 citations and an h-index of 16; a SCImago-derived listing gave SJR 0.113, an h-index of 11 and a best quartile of Q4 in Social Sciences (miscellaneous). A 2012 Journal Citation Reports impact factor of 0.133 is historical and should not be quoted as current.

Does Sociologus charge authors? No author charge is published on the publisher page checked; the position is best described as not publicly disclosed, and authors should confirm directly with the editorial office if a funder requires certainty.

How should manuscripts be formatted? In accordance with the Chicago Manual of Style, author-date variant, per the publisher's author guidance.

Verdict

Sociologus rewards a particular kind of manuscript: patiently observed, clearly written, and ambitious enough to make its material speak to readers outside its field site. Its century-long, twice-founded history, its university-based editorial team, its bilingual reach and its deep indexing footprint make it a credible, durable home for ethnographic social science — provided the author quotes its modest citation metrics honestly, by database and date, and chooses it for fit rather than for a number.