Studies in History

About Studies in History

About Studies in History

Studies in History is a peer-reviewed history journal published by SAGE Publishing in India in association with Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. Its print ISSN is 0257-6430 and its electronic ISSN is 0973-080X, the pair recorded in the Journals World entry, confirmed on the journal's own SAGE page — which gives the numbers in compact form as ISSN 02576430 and eISSN 0973080X — and confirmed again in the OpenAlex source record resolved from those ISSNs. It appears twice a year, and its editorial home is the Centre for Historical Studies at JNU, one of the most influential history departments in South Asia. SAGE describes the journal's purpose directly: it is a peer-reviewed journal that aims to publish original works with information, arguments and insights that contribute significantly to the field of historical research, reflecting the considerable expansion and diversification that has occurred in historical research in India in recent years, in which the old preoccupation with political history has been integrated into a broader framework placing equal emphasis on social, economic and cultural history.

That description carries a quiet claim that long-standing readers will recognise as accurate. Studies in History is one of the journals in which modern Indian historiography argued itself into its present shape. A journal edited from the Centre for Historical Studies, carrying an advisory board that includes some of the best-known names in the writing of Indian history, and open at the same time to regional problems, to neglected periods of India's past, to articles on countries other than India, and to contributions challenging received wisdom on long-standing issues — such a journal is not simply a container for articles. It is one of the places where the discipline in India decides what counts as a question. This profile sets out what the journal is, how it works, what it publishes, and how a prospective author should approach it, using the journal's own SAGE pages as the primary source.

Identity, home and standing

The journal's institutional home explains most of its character. The Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University was founded as a centre for the integrated study of history — ancient, medieval and modern taught and researched in conversation with each other — and it became, from the 1970s onwards, a principal site of the debates that reshaped Indian historiography: over feudalism, over the character of colonialism, over peasant and labour history, over communalism, gender and caste, and over the writing of history itself. A journal published in association with that centre, edited by its faculty and advised by figures of the standing of Romila Thapar and Harbans Mukhia — both named on the SAGE advisory editorial board listing, Mukhia as formerly at JNU and Thapar at JNU — inherits both the strengths and the expectations of that tradition. Its volume numbering on the SAGE page consulted for this profile had reached volume 40, and citation-database coverage summaries of the journal begin in 1985, the run from which its Scopus-facing record is built; the journal should be understood as a title with a four-decade modern run behind it, not as a recent entrant.

It also helps to distinguish the journal from a near namesake that causes real confusion in catalogues and citations. Studies in People's History, also published by SAGE in India, is a different journal, with a different ISSN pair, a different editorial home in the Aligarh historians' community, and a different origin. Papers, reviews and library records for the two titles are occasionally crossed. Everything in this profile concerns Studies in History, eISSN 0973-080X, the JNU-associated journal — authors citing either title should check the ISSN, not just the short name, before they submit a reference or a manuscript.

Scope: what the journal publishes

SAGE's full statement of the journal's aims adds several commitments to the summary above, and each of them maps onto a real strand in the journal's contents. Newer approaches and themes that seek to advance the scope and significance of the discipline are promoted. The journal examines regional problems and pays attention to some of the neglected periods of India's past. It also publishes articles concerning countries other than India. And it provides a forum for articles on the writing of different varieties of history, and for contributions challenging received wisdom on long-standing issues. Read together, those sentences describe a general history journal with an Indian centre of gravity and a historiographical conscience: it wants empirical work on Indian history in all periods, social, economic and cultural as much as political; it wants work that recovers regions and periods the metropolitan narratives skip; it welcomes comparative and non-Indian work that speaks to its readers; and it reserves a valued place for reflection on method and on the discipline itself.

An independent bibliometric study of the journal's contents over the 2018–2023 period, published in an Indian library science journal, gives a useful ground-level picture of that scope in action: the journal's articles in those years covered colonial India, Mughal India and medieval India prominently among other periods and themes, covered topics in social, cultural and economic history, and were accompanied by a substantial book review presence — the same study counted dozens of book reviews across the period, on historical studies from publishers worldwide, and noted that most articles ran to more than ten pages and most reviews to at least three, which is the physical signature of a journal that gives arguments room to develop. Contributors to the journal in that study came from across India and from abroad — with the largest groups from Delhi and West Bengal and a meaningful international minority — a pattern consistent with a national journal of record that is also read outside its home country.

Editorial team

The editors listed by SAGE are Jyoti Atwal, Umesh Ashok Kadam and Heeraman Tiwari, each of the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. The advisory editorial board named on the journal's page consists of Harbans Mukhia, formerly at JNU, and Romila Thapar of JNU — two names that between them represent medieval and ancient Indian history at its most influential, and whose presence signals the standard the journal sets for itself. Editorial teams in university-edited journals rotate as faculty take on and hand over the role, so this listing is quoted as the team SAGE presented when this profile was researched; the current SAGE page governs at any later date. For an author, the practical meaning of a faculty-edited journal of this kind is that the first readers of a manuscript are themselves research historians in the field the journal covers, and the initial screening described below is a scholarly judgement, not an administrative one.

Submission, peer review and house style

The contributor guidelines published by SAGE for this journal are unusually complete, and they repay reading in full before a manuscript is drafted, because this journal still works in a distinctive, print-rooted way. Manuscripts of articles should be submitted in MS Word, double-spaced, with figures and tables attached in separate files. The cover page should carry only the title of the article and the author's name, postal and email addresses and phone numbers — the separation that double-blind review requires. All articles must include an abstract of approximately 200 words and four to seven keywords that reflect the theme of the article; the guidelines' own examples — Dalit, autobiography, manual labour, tradition — show the level of specificity expected. The guidelines give the submission addresses as the journal's email, studiesinhistory@gmail.com, or by post to The Editors, Studies in History, Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Mehrauli Road, New Delhi 110067. Authors receive a copyright form once a contribution is accepted, and the submission is treated as final only after the signed form is received; where there are several authors, the corresponding author signs.

Review is a two-stage process on the journal's own description. All manuscripts are reviewed initially by the editors, and only papers that meet the editorial standards of the journal and fit within its aims and scope are sent for outside review. The journal then adheres to what SAGE calls a rigorous double-blind reviewing policy, in which the identity of reviewer and author are concealed from each other throughout. The journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Authors should therefore expect the real possibility of a desk decision, and should treat fit with the stated scope — historical research that contributes information, arguments and insights significantly to the field — as the first hurdle their manuscript has to clear.

The house style is part of the journal's identity and is set out in detail: footnotes, consecutively numbered, presented at the foot of each page, with complete source references for tables, figures and maps cited beneath them; Chicago Manual of Style formatting for references in footnotes and source citations; British spellings, with the guidelines' own examples (programme, labour, centre) alongside a preference for -ize forms where alternatives exist; single quotation marks, reserving double marks for quotations within quotations, and no quotation marks for indented passages of forty-five words or more; headings limited to three or four unnumbered levels; diacritical marks used carefully and consistently in writing on pre-modern history, and sparingly in work on the modern period; and figures and tables supplied to publication quality, with images at a minimum of 300 dpi. A manuscript prepared to those rules signals to the editors that its author knows the journal — a small thing that experienced authors never leave to chance.

Indexing and metrics

SAGE lists the journal's abstracting and indexing services on its page, and that publisher listing is quoted here as such: Bibliography of Asian Studies (BAS), DeepDyve, Dutch-KB, EBSCO, Indian Citation Index (ICI), J-Gate, OCLC, Ohio, Portico, ProQuest, SCOPUS, and Web of Science: Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI). Scopus and ESCI are the two entries that most often matter for institutional credit, and both appear in the publisher's own list; authors should nevertheless confirm current coverage in the service itself at submission time, since index coverage can change and since it is the index, not the publisher page, that a university committee will check. A DOAJ search for the print ISSN returned no record during this research, which is expected for a subscription journal of this kind, and no open-access claim is made for the journal here.

Resolved through the OpenAlex ISSN endpoint for 0257-6430 — source S21230803 — OpenAlex counted 707 works and 3,472 citations, with an h-index of 28, an i10-index of 99 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.06 at the time of this research, listing SAGE Publishing as host organisation, India as country, and topics including South Asian Studies and Diaspora, Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies, Indian and Buddhist Studies, Islamic Studies and History, and Indigenous Cultures and History. Those topics match the journal's stated scope closely. SCImago-derived summaries, by contrast, report an SJR of 0.101, an h-index of 18 and a best quartile of Q4 in History, with coverage from 1985; the original Journals World shell reported an h-index of 19 and called the journal Q3. The gap between the OpenAlex h-index of 28 and the Scopus-based figures around 18 or 19 is a familiar database effect — different document sets, different treatment of a long backfile, different snapshot dates — and the figures are quoted here with their sources attached rather than merged into a single invented number. OpenAlex also records an article processing charge figure of USD 3,650 for this source; the SAGE pages consulted for this profile did not state an APC for the journal, so that database figure should be treated as unverified for this title and any charge question should be put to the publisher directly. History, like other humanities fields, cites slowly and through books as much as through articles, so the honest reading of all these numbers together is of a long-running national journal with a deep, durable citation record in its field.

Who should read and publish here

Studies in History is a natural home for historians of India in any period — ancient, medieval, early modern, colonial and post-independence — whose work brings new information, a new argument or a significant reinterpretation; for social, economic and cultural historians whose material sits in regional archives and neglected periods; for historians of other countries whose work speaks to Indian readers or invites comparison; and for scholars writing historiography, method and the disciplined challenge to received wisdom that the journal explicitly invites. Its book reviews make it a reading journal as well as a publishing one: historians who want to keep up with the monograph literature in Indian and South Asian history will find its review pages a efficient guide, and librarians in South Asian studies will recognise it as a standard holding.

Authors should approach it with the respect its process implies. Read recent issues before submitting, and notice the length and footnote discipline of the articles it prints. Write the 200-word abstract and the specific keywords the guidelines ask for. Prepare the manuscript double-spaced, anonymised beyond its cover page, in British spelling with Chicago-style footnotes. And expect editorial screening by working historians before external review: in this journal the desk decision is part of the quality system, and a paper that clears it has already earned something.

Frequently asked questions

What are the ISSNs of Studies in History? Print ISSN 0257-6430 and electronic ISSN 0973-080X, as given on the journal's SAGE page and in its OpenAlex record.

Who publishes it, and where is it edited? SAGE Publications India publishes it in association with Jawaharlal Nehru University; it is edited at the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, New Delhi. The numeric value that appeared in the publisher field of the older Journals World shell was a garbled internal value, not a publisher name.

How often does it appear? Twice a year, as SAGE states.

Is it peer reviewed? Yes. After initial editorial review, manuscripts go to outside review under a rigorous double-blind policy, and the journal is a COPE member.

How do I submit? Under the SAGE contributor guidelines, by email to the journal's address given there, or by post to the Editors at the Centre for Historical Studies, JNU, New Mehrauli Road, New Delhi 110067, with a cover page, a roughly 200-word abstract and four to seven keywords.

Is it the same as Studies in People's History? No. That is a separate SAGE journal with its own ISSN pair and editorial home; check the ISSN to tell the two apart.

Sources and verification note

This profile was built primarily from the journal's own page on the SAGE India site (aims and scope, association with Jawaharlal Nehru University, ISSN and eISSN, biannual frequency, current volume, editors and advisory board, indexing list, COPE membership and the full contributor guidelines including the submission addresses, the double-blind policy and the house style rules); from the OpenAlex source record resolved through the ISSN endpoint for source S21230803 (work and citation counts, summary statistics, topics and the APC figure flagged in the text as unverified against the publisher pages); from SCImago-derived summaries for the SJR, quartile and coverage context, attributed as aggregator figures; from a published bibliometric study of the journal's 2018–2023 contents in an Indian library science journal; from a DOAJ API search for ISSN 0257-6430, which returned no record; and from the saved Journals World REST record for post 33920, whose stored publisher value and Q3 label are corrected or qualified in the text above.