Statisztikai Szemle

About Statisztikai Szemle

Statisztikai Szemle — In-Depth Profile

Statisztikai Szemle — in English, the Statistical Review — is the scientific journal of the Hungarian Central Statistical Office (Központi Statisztikai Hivatal, KSH), published in Budapest, Hungary, under ISSN 0039-0690. It is a monthly, peer-reviewed periodical in the statistical sciences, in publication since 1923, which makes it one of the longest-running national statistical journals in Europe. The journal appears primarily in Hungarian, with English-language special issues published under the name Hungarian Statistical Review, and it is open access: the publisher's own publication-ethics statement records that there are no subscriptions or pay-per-view fees and that all articles are readable on the journal's website. The stored JournalsWorld record for this post gives its ISSN as 0039-0690 and a stored h-index of 6, with Scopus coverage windows that reflect the journal's long and interrupted indexing history.

This profile brings together what an author, reader, librarian or evaluator needs in one place: the journal's identity and identifiers, its century-long history, its publisher and editorial arrangements, its scope across statistical theory and practice, its open-access and archiving position, its attributed metrics and indexing record, how submission works, how it sits alongside neighbouring Hungarian and European statistical journals, and answers to frequently asked questions. Every figure is attributed to the source it came from — the Hungarian Central Statistical Office's own pages and published mastheads, or OpenAlex — and anything that could not be verified from a fetched source is stated plainly as such rather than guessed.

Identity and Publisher

The journal's title is Hungarian: Statisztikai Szemle translates as Statistical Review, and the journal has long presented itself to international readers under exactly that English name. Its ISSN, 0039-0690, is the identifier printed on its mastheads for decades — it appears, for example, on the 1999, 2014 and 2015 issues preserved in the Hungarian Academy's journal archive — and it is the ISSN under which OpenAlex resolves the source. One identifier serves both language faces of the journal: the English-language special issues titled Hungarian Statistical Review carry the same ISSN 0039-0690 on their mastheads, a point that matters for anyone cataloguing the title or checking for duplicate records.

Ownership is unambiguous. The Hungarian Central Statistical Office's publication-ethics statement for the journal declares that Statisztikai Szemle is owned, managed and published by the Hungarian Central Statistical Office, and the same statement gives the journal's home as the KSH website. The stored JournalsWorld record originally showed the publisher as a bare numeric code, an artefact of the data import behind that record; the publisher verified from the KSH's own pages is the Hungarian Central Statistical Office. The journal is therefore an official-statistics journal in the fullest sense: it is the research outlet of a national statistical institute, edited from the institute's Budapest headquarters at Keleti Károly utca 5–7, the address carried on its mastheads and still the KSH's seat.

History

The journal's volume numbering tells its own story: the 1999 volume is volume 77, the 2004 volume is volume 82, and the 2014 and 2015 volumes are volumes 92 and 93, a sequence that counts back to a first volume in 1923. Scholarly histories of Hungarian statistics likewise describe the journal as published since 1923, originally under the aegis of the Hungarian statistical community around the statistical office and its society. A journal founded in 1923 has lived through the full arc of modern Hungarian history — the interwar kingdom, the Second World War, the socialist planned-economy decades, and the post-1989 transition to a market economy inside the European statistical system — and its pages record how official statistics adapted to each era, from the EKS index-number work used in international purchasing-power comparisons (a method with Hungarian authorship, Éltető, Köves and Szulc, published and discussed in this journal) to the mixed-mode census methodology debates of the 2011 census round.

The journal's Scopus coverage, as preserved in the stored JournalsWorld record, is correspondingly discontinuous — windows including 1946, 1948, 1977–1999 and 2019–2025 — which reflects the changing indexing treatment of a Hungarian-language title across the decades rather than gaps in publication itself; the volume sequence shows publication continuing through those windows. Through the socialist period the journal was the principal Hungarian forum for statistical methodology in a planned economy, and editors of that era — the 1999 masthead names Tamás Mellár as editor in charge and László Hunyadi as executive editor — steered it toward the methodological mainstream. After 1989 its content re-centred on the statistics of a market economy and, later, on the harmonised methods of the European Statistical System. The English-language face of the journal also matured in this period: around the year 2000 the journal's notes for contributors describe it as a monthly scientific periodical of the KSH supplemented each year by one or two special issues in English, and those special numbers, titled Hungarian Statistical Review, became the journal's window to international readers. The KSH today presents the Hungarian Statistical Review as its peer-reviewed English journal appearing twice a year.

Scope and Content

The KSH's own description of the journal is that it analyses and reviews processes in Hungary regarding population, economic, cultural and social life, based on the comprehensive data of the KSH and other institutions; that it presents up-to-date statistical methods; that it deals with Hungarian and international statistical history; that it reviews the operation of the Hungarian statistical organisation; and that it covers statistical achievements from foreign countries. The aims-and-scope statement the KSH publishes for the journal's English face widens the same remit into a full subject map: development of modern statistical methods; methodological aspects of statistics, including new methods, critical evaluations and new applications; applied statistics across economy and finance, industry, business and commerce, sociology, demography, insurance, market and opinion research, psychology, medicine, education, environment and law; data-collection methodology, covering sample surveys, censuses and administrative record systems; survey design questions such as sampling, nonresponse, measurement error and mode effects; the national and international history of statistics; the operation and international environment of statistical services; the development and challenges of national and global statistical systems; and statistics in society, including statistical literacy and education.

The OpenAlex topic profile of the source, built from the journal's actual citing and cited literature, is consistent with that official scope: Hungarian social, economic and educational studies lead, followed by agricultural economics, statistical methods and applications, monetary policy, and historical economic and social studies. In other words, this is simultaneously a methods journal and a Hungarian-studies journal: a paper can belong because its method is new, or because its measurement of Hungarian society is authoritative, and the strongest submissions are usually both. Demography is a persistent strand — fertility, mortality, migration, households and census analysis recur across the decades sampled in the journal's archive — alongside economic statistics, price and index-number methodology, and regional analysis.

Sections, Special Issues and the Census Tradition

A typical issue of the journal mixes full research studies with shorter methodological notes, reviews of Hungarian and foreign statistical literature, and reporting on the life of the statistical service — the balance its publisher describes when it says the journal presents methods, reviews the operation of the Hungarian statistical organisation and covers achievements abroad. The English special issues follow the same architecture in translation: the 2015 special number, for example, opens with studies on business-sector indicators and demographic measurement and reproduces the journal's standard sections under the Hungarian Statistical Review masthead. This mixture is deliberate. Because the journal is read by practising official statisticians as well as academics, its pages carry both the theory of a new estimator and the practical account of how a survey redesign behaved in the field, and its review sections have historically been one of the main channels through which Hungarian statisticians encountered foreign methodological literature.

The journal also has a documented tradition of thematic special issues tied to the great operations of official statistics. The clearest recent example is the 2014 thematic census issue (volume 92, special number 17), devoted to the 2011 Hungarian population census: introduced by Gabriella Vukovich, then the KSH's president, it carried studies on the social changes of the preceding decade as revealed by the census, on the methodological challenges of Hungary's mixed-mode census design, on employment and unemployment measured by census-type surveys, on changing households and families, on housing conditions, and on national and ethnic minorities in the census data. An author considering the journal should understand this rhythm: alongside its open monthly intake, the journal periodically concentrates an issue on a single data operation or theme, and such issues become reference points that Hungarian researchers cite for decades. The archive pattern — ordinary monthly numbers punctuated by English special numbers and thematic issues — also explains why simple annual article counts understate the journal's weight in its national literature.

Editorial Arrangements and Peer Review

The journal is edited from within the KSH. Its mastheads across the years show an editor-in-chief (in earlier decades styled editor in charge) supported by executive and managing editors drawn from the statistical office's senior staff: the 1999 masthead lists Tamás Mellár as editor in charge with László Hunyadi as executive editor; the 2004 masthead lists Péter Pukli as editor in charge with Hunyadi again as executive editor; and the 2014–2015 mastheads list Antónia Hüttl as editor-in-chief with Orsolya Dobokay-Szabó as managing editor. For the journal's English-language face, the KSH's aims-and-scope page currently invites researchers, academics and professionals to submit manuscripts by e-mail to the Editor-in-Chief it names there, Tamás Dusek. The current editor-in-chief of the Hungarian monthly itself could not be verified from a fetched current masthead at the time of checking, and is therefore not asserted here.

Peer review is explicit policy, not assumption: the KSH describes the journal's English face as peer-reviewed, and the journal's published publication-ethics and malpractice statement — hosted on the KSH website — sets out the machinery in detail, including that reviewed articles are treated confidentially before publication, that editors must take reasonable steps to identify and prevent publication of papers involving research misconduct, and that the journal will publish corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies when needed, with guidelines for retracting or correcting articles. For an official-statistics journal this ethics apparatus carries extra weight, because its articles often rest on the KSH's own data production; the statement's insistence on editorial independence procedures is part of what makes the journal a scholarly venue rather than a house bulletin.

Publishing Model, Access and Archiving

The journal's publishing schedule, stated in its ethics statement, is monthly — twelve issues a year — a rhythm it has kept, with interruptions across its history, since the interwar period; the English special issues supplement that rhythm. Its access model is fully open: the ethics statement records that Statisztikai Szemle is an open access journal with no subscriptions and no pay-per-view fees, and that all individual articles are readable on the journal's website at the KSH. No article processing charge was stated in any publisher source fetched for this profile, and none is claimed here; authors should confirm the position with the editorial office if their funder requires written confirmation. Archiving is institutional: the same statement records that the journal has electronic backup and preservation arrangements and is archived by the Hungarian Central Statistical Office in its digital archive, while the Hungarian Academy's open journal archive (REAL-J) holds digitised back issues, including the 1999, 2014 and 2015 volumes consulted for this profile — a preservation depth few commercial titles can match.

Copyright and licensing information, the ethics statement notes, is described on the journal's website. Readers should therefore treat reuse terms as stated there rather than assuming a standard licence; the verified position for this profile is free reading access for all articles, with licensing as published by the KSH.

Metrics and Indexing

Each metric below is attributed, because the databases disagree in the way they always do for a long-lived, mainly Hungarian-language title. OpenAlex, resolving the source through its ISSN endpoint at the time of checking, recorded 493 works and 700 citations for Statisztikai Szemle, with summary statistics of an h-index of 8, an i10-index of 3 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.49; it names the Hungarian Central Statistical Office as host organisation and gives the journal's home page as the KSH site. The stored JournalsWorld record, built from SCImago-derived data, records an h-index of 6 and places the journal in the third quartile (Q3). The two h-index values are snapshots from different databases at different dates, not a contradiction to be resolved by picking one silently.

Indexing history is the more informative story for evaluators. The stored record's Scopus coverage windows — including 1977–1999 and a current window running 2019–2025 — show a title that Scopus has covered in long stretches, dropped, and covered again, a pattern typical for national-language journals. At the time of checking, a search of the Directory of Open Access Journals by the journal's ISSN returned no listing, so no DOAJ listing is claimed, even though the journal is verifiably open access on its publisher's site; authors and librarians should not treat the absence of a DOAJ record as evidence about the journal's access model, which the KSH states directly. No Journal Impact Factor was displayed in any fetched source, and none is claimed.

How to Submit

The KSH's published route for the journal's English-language submissions is direct: manuscripts are submitted by e-mail to the Editor-in-Chief named on the KSH's aims-and-scope page for the Hungarian Statistical Review — currently Tamás Dusek, at the KSH address given on that page. Hungarian-language submissions to the monthly are handled by the journal's editorial office at the KSH in Budapest (Keleti Károly utca 5–7, H-1024 Budapest; postal address P.O. Box 51, H-1525 Budapest, from the journal's mastheads). Authors should prepare manuscripts in line with the journal's contributor guidance on the KSH website — historically including a summary of no more than about 200 words with keywords, a convention stated in the journal's published notes for contributors — and should expect confidential peer review under the journal's published ethics statement. Because the journal's readership is the Hungarian and European official-statistics community, authors maximise their chances by making the data provenance and method explicit: which survey, census or register the numbers come from, and what the methodological contribution is beyond the Hungarian case.

Similar Journals

Within Hungary, the closest neighbouring titles are the KSH's own stablemates and the country's other social-science periodicals: Demográfia, the demographic quarterly the KSH describes as one of Hungary's oldest demographic periodicals; Területi Statisztika, the KSH's regional-statistics journal; and Hungarian economics and sociology titles such as Közgazdasági Szemle. Internationally, the journal's natural comparators are the other national-statistical-institute journals of Europe — titles such as the Journal of Official Statistics (Statistics Sweden's English-language journal, the field's methodological flagship), Survey Methodology, and the statistical reviews published by other national offices — against which Statisztikai Szemle trades a smaller, Hungarian-centred authorship for unmatched access to Hungarian official data and a century of methodological continuity. Within this JournalsWorld directory, readers may also compare the profiles of other long-running national review titles covered in the same census of journals. The practical guidance is simple: choose this journal when the paper's authority derives from Hungarian official statistics or from methods developed inside a national statistical institute; choose an international methods journal when the contribution is a general technique with no Hungarian data anchor.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of Statisztikai Szemle? ISSN 0039-0690, printed on its mastheads and used by both the Hungarian monthly and its English-language Hungarian Statistical Review special issues.

Who publishes Statisztikai Szemle? The Hungarian Central Statistical Office (KSH) in Budapest owns, manages and publishes it, per the journal's publication-ethics statement on the KSH website. The stored JournalsWorld record's numeric publisher code was an import artefact.

When was it founded? Its volume sequence counts back to 1923 (volume 77 in 1999, volume 93 in 2015), and scholarly histories of Hungarian statistics describe it as published since 1923.

Is it open access? Yes. The KSH states that the journal is open access with no subscriptions or pay-per-view fees, and that all articles are readable on its website.

How often does it appear? Monthly — twelve issues a year, per the publisher's statement — supplemented by English-language special issues under the Hungarian Statistical Review name, which the KSH presents as appearing twice a year.

What are its metrics? OpenAlex recorded 493 works, 700 citations and an h-index of 8 at checking time; the stored SCImago-derived record gives an h-index of 6 and a Q3 placement. No Journal Impact Factor is claimed.

Is it the same journal as the Hungarian Statistical Review? They are two faces of one title under one ISSN: the Hungarian Statistical Review is the journal's English-language edition, historically its special issues and now presented by the KSH as its twice-yearly English journal.

How do I submit? The KSH directs English-language manuscripts by e-mail to the Editor-in-Chief named on its aims-and-scope page; Hungarian submissions go to the editorial office at the KSH in Budapest.