Studia Ethnologica Croatica

About Studia Ethnologica Croatica

About Studia Ethnologica Croatica

Studia Ethnologica Croatica is an annual, peer-reviewed journal of ethnology and cultural anthropology published by the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia. Its print ISSN is 1330-3627 and its online ISSN is 1848-9532. The journal's portal on Hrčak, the Croatian scientific journals platform, describes it as the journal of that department, and its statement of purpose — echoed in the Central and Eastern European Online Library (CEEOL) — is to publish new research findings in ethnology and cultural anthropology and in related disciplines, securing an interdisciplinary approach to cultural phenomena, together with book reviews.

The journal began in 1989 as Studia ethnologica, published by the department's Centre for Ethnological Cartography (later part of the Department), and took its present title, Studia ethnologica Croatica, from its fifth issue in 1993, according to the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology's own history page at the University of Zagreb. The department records that its founder was Vitomir Belaj, a central figure in modern Croatian ethnology, whom the University of Zagreb later named professor emeritus. That lineage — a journal founded inside a university department at the moment Croatian ethnology was redefining itself, and carried by that department ever since — explains both its national importance and its international address: it is Croatia's flagship ethnology journal, written from Zagreb for a European and global anthropological readership.

Identity at a Glance

Title: Studia Ethnologica Croatica (1989–1992 as Studia ethnologica). Print ISSN 1330-3627; online ISSN 1848-9532. Publisher: Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Ivana Lučića 3, Zagreb, Croatia — the address recorded in Scopus-derived journal listings and on the journal's Hrčak presence. Frequency: annual, one issue per year. Field: ethnology, cultural anthropology, folklore studies and neighbouring disciplines. Access: open access via Hrčak. Directory of Open Access Journals listing: verified — the DOAJ search API returns the journal under both ISSNs, naming the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, as publisher, recording no article processing charge, and giving the licence as CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. The JournalsWorld record (post 33748) carries only the print ISSN; the online ISSN above comes from DOAJ/OpenAlex records and should be added to any catalogue entry for completeness.

History in Croatian Ethnology

To understand this journal, it helps to understand the discipline it serves. Croatian ethnology developed as a historically minded study of folk culture — peasant life, custom, material culture, oral tradition — and, across the second half of the twentieth century, broadened into a cultural anthropology engaged with contemporary society: postsocialist transition, war and displacement, heritage politics, tourism, migration, urban life and European integration. The department's own history traces that arc institutionally, from the Institute of Ethnology period (1982–1992) and the ethnological atlas and cartography work, through the department's renaming to include cultural anthropology in 2004, reflecting the theoretical expansion of the field.

Studia Ethnologica Croatica was created in 1989, just before Croatia's independence and the war of 1991–1995, and it published through the decades in which Croatian ethnologists documented wartime experience, refugee life, and the remaking of everyday culture in a new state. Scholarship surveying Croatian anthropology of the 1990s treats the journal — alongside its sister departmental and society publications — as one of the places where that record was made. In the decades since, its contents have followed the discipline outward: from village monographs and ritual calendars toward heritage regimes, museum practice, food culture, popular culture, digital life and the anthropology of contemporary institutions, while retaining a distinctive attention to Croatian and Southeast European material. An author submitting here is therefore writing into a conversation with a documented past, and referees will expect awareness of how a topic has been handled in that conversation.

Scope: Ethnology, Cultural Anthropology and Neighbouring Fields

The journal publishes research articles presenting new findings in ethnology and cultural anthropology, and it explicitly welcomes related disciplines where they contribute to an interdisciplinary understanding of cultural phenomena. In practice that breadth includes folklore studies, ethnomusicology-adjacent work, museum and heritage studies, anthropology of religion, kinship and family studies, migration and diaspora research, urban anthropology, and the study of postsocialist transformation — provided the manuscript works ethnographically or ethnologically, with evidence drawn from fieldwork, archives, material culture, texts or images handled as cultural evidence.

Alongside research articles, the journal publishes book reviews, a genre it has sustained throughout its run and one through which Croatian readers follow international anthropological publishing. The annual rhythm shapes the scope in a useful way. A once-a-year journal cannot chase news; it publishes work expected to remain worth reading when the next volume appears. Manuscripts that offer a well-documented case, a clear conceptual contribution, and writing that a non-specialist anthropologist can follow tend to suit that rhythm best. Purely descriptive local reports without an analytical frame, and purely theoretical essays without ethnographic grounding, are the two kinds of submission most likely to struggle — not because either local knowledge or theory is unwelcome, but because the journal's tradition joins the two.

Language and Readership

The journal is multilingual in character, publishing in Croatian and in English (with contributions in other European languages appearing across its history), and its Hrčak portal presents it to both a domestic and an international audience. That bilingual reality is central to its function. Croatian-language publication sustains a national scholarly literature and a Croatian technical vocabulary for ethnology; English-language publication carries Croatian ethnographic material into comparative debates from which Southeast Europe is still too often absent. Authors should follow the current author instructions on Hrčak for the language, abstract and summary requirements of the present volume — bilingual abstracts and summaries have been a long-standing feature of Croatian scholarly publishing practice — and should have language editing done before submission if they are writing in a language that is not their strongest.

Its readership, accordingly, is double: Croatian and regional ethnologists, folklorists, museum professionals and graduate students, for whom the journal is a core reference; and international anthropologists of Europe, postsocialism, heritage and migration, who encounter it through Hrčak, DOAJ, Scopus-derived listings and CEEOL. Writing for that double audience means glossing local terms once, explaining institutions that a Zagreb reader knows and a reader abroad does not, and resisting the opposite temptation to over-explain Croatia's basic geography and history.

Editorial Model, Ethics and Peer Review

The journal is edited from the Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology in Zagreb and operates as a refereed scholarly journal: CEEOL's description states plainly that it is peer reviewed. The journal publishes a formal publication ethics and malpractice statement through Hrčak, covering the duties of authors, reviewers and editors and aimed at raising publication quality and guiding all parties on ethical issues — a document prospective authors should read before submitting, since it sets the journal's expectations on originality, authorship, disclosure and the handling of complaints. The editorial address and workflow run through the Hrčak portal (hrcak.srce.hr/sec), which is the route named on the JournalsWorld record and in DOAJ's record for the journal.

Authors should prepare for review by specialists who know the regional literature. Ethnographic manuscripts will be read for the quality and ethics of their fieldwork: how access was gained, how interlocutors are protected and represented, and whether quotations and images are used with appropriate care. Archive- and text-based manuscripts will be read for source command. In both cases, a methods passage that is candid about what was done — rather than a formulaic assurance — serves the author best. Timelines for an annual journal are measured against the volume cycle, and authors needing a decision by a fixed external date should ask the editorial office about the current volume's timetable before submitting.

Open Access, Licensing and Costs

On costs and rights, the verified record is unusually clear. DOAJ's record for the journal states that it has no article processing charge, and gives its licence as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). The no-derivatives element deserves an author's attention: it governs how published articles may be adapted and remixed by others, and authors planning translations, abridgements or teaching adaptations of their own published article should understand its terms or discuss their needs with the editorial office. Full texts are openly readable through Hrčak, Croatia's national journals portal, which gives the journal stable distribution independent of any commercial platform. No subscription is required to read it.

Indexing and Discoverability

Verified indexing and listing evidence for this journal includes: listing in the Directory of Open Access Journals (confirmed directly through the DOAJ search API for both ISSNs in preparing this profile); presence on Hrčak with full-text open access; inclusion in CEEOL, the Central and Eastern European Online Library, which carries its description and contents for regional studies readers; and indexing in OpenAlex as source S4210192708, whose record carries both ISSNs and the Hrčak homepage. Scopus-derived secondary listings describe the journal with coverage from 2015 in the data underlying the JournalsWorld record and give CiteScore-type figures — one aggregator reports a CiteScore of 0.5 and a low SNIP figure — but this profile attributes such numbers to the aggregators that publish them and advises authors to consult the current Scopus source list for the authoritative coverage statement at the time they need it.

Metrics: What the Counts Do and Do Not Show

The JournalsWorld record cites an h-index of 6. OpenAlex, fetched directly for source S4210192708, records 372 works, 375 citations and an h-index of 9, with coverage from 1989 to 2025 — a notably complete run that matches the journal's founding date. The two h-index figures differ because the databases count different material; neither is an error to be averaged away, and both describe the same underlying reality: a small annual journal whose individual articles are cited steadily within a specialist field rather than in large numbers across science as a whole. Ethnology is a book- and chapter-citing discipline in which important influence flows through monographs, museum work and regional journals that citation databases capture imperfectly, so these counts understate the journal's standing among the readers who actually use it.

For evaluation purposes, the stronger facts about this journal are qualitative and verifiable: continuous publication since 1989, a university department as publisher, a published ethics statement, DOAJ listing with no author charge, and a founding role in a national discipline. An anthropologist choosing a venue for Southeast European ethnography will weigh those facts, and the judgement of regional specialists, more heavily than a fractional citation score — and appointment and review panels in the field generally do the same.

Publishing in Studia Ethnologica Croatica: Practical Guidance

Start from the journal's Hrčak pages and read the most recent volume in full. Pay attention to how articles frame Croatian or regional material for an international reader, how fieldwork ethics are described, and how reviews are written, since review editors notice authors who understand the genre. Follow the current guidelines for authors on Hrčak for manuscript length, referencing, abstracts and summaries, and illustrations — ethnographic articles often depend on photographs and maps, whose reproduction quality and permissions should be settled early. Keep notes and quotations anonymised or consented as your research ethics require, and say in the manuscript how that was handled.

In a cover note, locate your article in the journal's conversation: name the debate it joins, the material it rests on, and the readers — regional specialists, comparative anthropologists, heritage or museum scholars — who most need it. Because the journal appears once a year, treat the submission as a considered placement rather than a rapid outlet: the reward for that patience is a durable, openly accessible article in the central journal of Croatian ethnology, read by exactly the community best placed to use it.

How to Judge Fit Before You Submit

Fit is the single strongest predictor of a smooth editorial experience at Studia Ethnologica Croatica, and it can be tested before any file is uploaded. Read at least three recent items in full, not just their titles or abstracts. Note the kind of evidence the journal rewards, the length it tolerates, the languages it actually prints, and the distance between the questions its authors ask and the question your manuscript asks. If your work would need to be reframed beyond recognition to sit comfortably beside those three items, it belongs elsewhere, however strong it is on its own terms. If, by contrast, your references, methods and intended readers already overlap substantially with theirs, submission is well grounded.

Second, test the practical conditions. Confirm that the article type you intend is one the journal currently publishes, that your manuscript length sits within its normal range, and that you can meet its documentation, anonymisation and file-format requirements without last-minute improvisation. Third, consider timing honestly: a journal publishing once a year cannot offer the turnaround of a weekly outlet, and a special or thematic route may be faster or slower than the ordinary route in ways only the editorial office can confirm. None of these checks requires insider knowledge; all of them are available from the journal's own pages and recent issues, which is precisely why editors treat a visibly well-matched submission as a signal of seriousness.

Risks, Limits and Honest Cautions

A profile of this kind can verify identity, publisher, licensing, indexing claims made by named databases, and citation behaviour as recorded by OpenAlex at the time of checking. It cannot guarantee acceptance, review speed, or future indexing, and no author should treat a journal-level metric as a promise about an individual article. Citation counts change as databases ingest new material, and the figures quoted here should be re-checked at the moment of any consequential decision, such as a tenure or promotion filing. Where this profile records a figure as not published, not publicly disclosed or could not be verified, that wording is deliberate: it marks the boundary between what official sources state and what would be guesswork.

Authors should also guard against imitation venues. Journals with similar titles exist in several of the fields covered here, and the only reliable defence is to navigate from the publisher or association address given in this profile, to confirm the ISSN on the journal's own masthead, and to refuse any request for payment that arrives through an unfamiliar channel. A legitimate editorial office will always be reachable through the official site linked from the publisher.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile was prepared from the journal's own and its publisher's official pages, its SciELO, Hrčak, ERIC or association records as applicable, the Directory of Open Access Journals search API record for its ISSN, and an OpenAlex record resolved through the ISSN endpoint and fetched by source ID. Figures attributed to OpenAlex or to secondary aggregators are identified as such in the text. Facts that could not be verified from those sources are described as not published, not publicly disclosed or could not be verified, in accordance with the standard applied throughout this profile.

A Note on the Journal's Sister Publications and Boundaries

Readers mapping Croatian ethnology should distinguish this journal from its close neighbours, because the Zagreb department and the Croatian Ethnological Society together sustain more than one periodical. The department co-publishes Etnološka tribina, the yearbook associated with the Croatian Ethnological Society, whose history reaches back to 1970 and whose character — a society yearbook with its own guidelines, rhythm and editorial identity — differs from the research-article focus of Studia Ethnologica Croatica. The two titles share a city, a discipline and some contributors, but they are separate journals with separate records, and citations, submissions and catalogue entries should never be transferred between them. The same care applies internationally: several European countries publish ethnology journals with similar Latin titles, and the Croatian journal is identified, uniquely, by its title together with its Zagreb publisher and its ISSN pair, 1330-3627 and 1848-9532. Authors citing work from this journal in international bibliographies serve their readers by giving the full title rather than an abbreviation alone, since abbreviated Latin titles are the point at which distinct national journals are most often confused in reference lists.