About Studies in Peoples History

Studies in People's History

Studies in People's History is a peer-reviewed history journal published by SAGE Publications in India in association with the Aligarh Historians Society. It began in 2014 and appears twice a year. Its print ISSN is 2348-4489 and its online ISSN is 2349-7718. The journal's own description, carried on the SAGE Journals site, is deliberately broad and deliberately social: it embraces all aspects of history under the broadest of definitions, but always bearing in mind their relationship with society at large. That single sentence explains both the title and the editorial taste of the journal. This is not a journal for antiquarian detail detached from human life. It is a journal for historical research that asks what past societies were like for the classes, groups, genders, movements and ordinary people who lived in them, and it welcomes detailed research and theoretical discussion in equal measure. This profile brings together the journal's identity, history, scope, editors, indexing, citation record and submission route, taken from the publisher's pages, reference works and independent bibliographic databases, so that a prospective author, reader or librarian can judge the journal on verified information rather than on a brief catalogue line.

Studies in People's History at a Glance

History and Identity

Studies in People's History appeared in 2014, a comparatively recent launch for a history journal, and its timing and sponsorship matter. The Aligarh Historians Society is associated with one of the most influential schools of Indian historiography, centred at Aligarh Muslim University, where social and economic history — the history of agrarian relations, of technology, of taxation, of peasants, artisans and working people — has been a defining research tradition for decades. A journal launched in association with that society, and edited by Irfan Habib and Shireen Moosvi, two historians closely identified with that tradition, was never likely to be a general miscellany. The title itself is a programme. People's history is history written with attention to those who rarely wrote the records themselves: cultivators, labourers, soldiers, women, lower castes, tribal communities, and the crowds and movements through which such groups entered politics.

Yet the journal's stated scope is wider than a single school. The SAGE description says the journal will cover all periods of Indian history — meaning, in its own words, the entire past of present-day South Asian nations plus Afghanistan — but will also include papers on other countries, especially where those papers concern worldwide movements that also affected India, or comparative history. The examples the journal itself gives are instructive: language shifts, technology transfers, feudalism, capitalism, colonialism and the genesis of modern ideas, together with comparative work on political structures, forms of thought and trends in art. In other words, a paper does not have to be about India, but a paper about elsewhere is most at home here when it illuminates a process that India also experienced, or when the comparison itself does intellectual work.

Publication has been continuous since 2014 on a biannual rhythm. Scopus coverage, as summarised in independent journal listings, runs from 2014 onward, and recent issues continue to appear on the SAGE Journals platform, with articles published online ahead of their issue assignment. The journal therefore sits in a useful middle position for authors: it is young enough to have a clear and current editorial identity, and established enough to have a decade of indexed publication behind it.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The journal welcomes papers across the full chronological range of South Asian history, from ancient to contemporary. Within that range, its SAGE description names the kinds of work that are especially welcome: the history of classes and other social groups, gender history, and the history of the National Movement — India's freedom struggle and the social forces around it. Those three emphases should guide an author's first judgement of fit. A tightly argued study of an agrarian class, a reading of gender relations in a particular period or archive, or a fresh account of a nationalist mobilisation starts with an advantage, because it speaks directly to the concerns the editors have announced.

Alongside research articles, the journal can include surveys of work done on particular fields, and reports or commentaries on textual sources, including inscriptions and archival documents. That second category is distinctive. Many history journals will only take a finished interpretive article; this journal explicitly makes room for the scholarly infrastructure of history — the edition, the inscription, the document, the survey that tells a field where it stands. For historians working with a newly noticed source, or with a body of inscriptions that needs careful presentation before interpretation, that openness is valuable and comparatively rare.

What the journal is not is also worth stating plainly. It is not a journal of current affairs, not a venue for unfootnoted opinion, and not a general social-science journal that happens to use historical examples. The SAGE text says the journal aspires to a detailed level of research and theoretical discussion, and authors should read that as a standard: detailed research, meaning primary-source work that can be checked, and theoretical discussion, meaning an argument about what the evidence changes in how historians understand the period, the group or the process in question.

Editorial Leadership and Publishing Arrangements

Reference listings for the journal name Irfan Habib and Shireen Moosvi as its editors. Both are historians of India with long publishing records in social, economic and cultural history, and their editorship connects the journal directly to the Aligarh tradition described above. The journal's SAGE page gives editorial contact addresses for manuscript correspondence and directs books for review to Professor Shireen Moosvi at an address in Aligarh, which confirms in practical terms that the editorial office is anchored in Aligarh even though the publishing operation is SAGE's.

SAGE Publications India is the publisher of record. Independent listings give the publisher as Sage Publications India Pvt. Ltd, with a New Delhi address, and the stored JournalsWorld record's garbled publisher field should not be relied on for this point: the number that appears there is not a publisher name. SAGE provides the production, platform, marketing and subscription infrastructure — the journal sits on journals.sagepub.com with the standard SAGE article layout, online-first publication, and institutional access arrangements — while the association with the Aligarh Historians Society provides the scholarly identity. That division of labour is common for society journals published with a large commercial-academic publisher, and it has a practical consequence for authors: editorial decisions and scholarly correspondence belong with the editors, while subscriptions, permissions and platform questions belong with SAGE.

The journal states that it is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Membership is a signal worth noting, because it commits the journal to follow COPE guidance on matters such as plagiarism, duplicate submission, authorship disputes and corrections. Authors should still read the journal's own submission declarations carefully, since COPE membership sets a framework rather than replacing a journal's specific rules.

Metrics, Indexing and Standing

The stored JournalsWorld record gives an h-index of 6 for this journal. OpenAlex, which resolved the journal through its ISSN endpoint to the source record for Studies in People's History, reports a larger cumulative picture: 410 works and 329 citations recorded for the source (OpenAlex source S4210194848, resolved through the ISSN endpoint and re-fetched directly to confirm), with a summary h-index of 8, an i10-index of 6 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.09. OpenAlex lists the host organisation as SAGE Publishing and does not classify the source as open access or as listed in DOAJ. Those OpenAlex figures are the database's own counts at the time of checking and should be quoted with that attribution, because OpenAlex counts a wider set of work types than a curated citation index does.

Independent Scopus-derived listings summarised in search results for this journal report a SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) of 0.108, a Scopus CiteScore of 0.2, and quartile placements of Q3 in History and Q4 in a general social-sciences category. The stored record on this site likewise labels the journal Q3. Authors should interpret those numbers in the context of the field. History is a slow-citing discipline: books matter as much as articles, citations accumulate over many years rather than two, and a journal founded in 2014 has had a short window in which to build a citation record. A low CiteScore in history does not carry the same meaning as a low CiteScore in a fast-moving laboratory science.

For indexing, reference listings for the journal state that it is abstracted and indexed in Scopus, J-Gate and UGC-CARE, and journal-search listings also report Web of Science Emerging Sources Citation Index coverage. UGC-CARE listing is particularly relevant for Indian academics, for whom publication in a CARE-listed journal can matter for appointment and promotion requirements. Because index coverage changes, an author whose institution requires a specific index should confirm the journal's current status in that index's own source list before submitting, rather than relying on any secondary profile, including this one. A Directory of Open Access Journals listing for this journal could not be verified from the DOAJ search API results consulted, and no claim about DOAJ listing is made here.

How to Submit

The journal's SAGE page directs manuscripts to the editors, giving editorial email addresses for submission correspondence, and asks that manuscripts be submitted only with the consent of all contributing authors. The person submitting is expected to check carefully that everyone whose work contributed to the manuscript is listed as an author. That instruction, which appears in the journal's own text, is worth following literally: authorship disputes after submission are far harder to resolve than a clear conversation before it.

Before submitting, an author should do four practical things. First, read two or three recent issues, not just the aims page, and check that the journal publishes work at the same scale and with the same kind of evidence as the manuscript in hand. Second, frame the introduction so that the paper's relationship to society at large — the journal's defining test — is explicit rather than implied. Third, prepare the apparatus properly: inscriptions, archival documents and textual sources should be cited in a form another historian can verify, since the journal explicitly values source-based work. Fourth, follow SAGE's general manuscript preparation requirements for formatting, references and supplementary files, and declare any funding, prior circulation or overlapping publication honestly at submission.

Books for review are handled separately: the journal's page directs review copies to Professor Shireen Moosvi in Aligarh. Review authorship in a journal of this kind is normally commissioned or agreed with the editors, so a scholar hoping to review should write to the editorial address first rather than sending an unsolicited review.

OpenAlex's source record for this journal lists APC price information (US$3,650 / £2,676), but no acceptance rate or decision-time figure published by the publisher was found in the sources consulted. Authors for whom a charge, a deadline or a decision window is decisive should confirm the current position with the editorial office and with SAGE directly before submitting, and should treat any third-party website quoting such figures for this journal with caution unless it names its source.

Who Should Publish Here, and Who Should Look Elsewhere

Studies in People's History is a strong choice for a historian of South Asia whose work is grounded in primary sources and whose argument concerns social structure, class, gender, labour, agrarian change, technology, ideas in circulation, or political mobilisation. It is also a good choice for a comparative historian whose non-Indian material is brought into genuine conversation with Indian experience, and for a scholar with a source, inscription or archive that deserves a documented presentation alongside interpretation. Doctoral researchers and early-career historians in Indian universities will find the combination of Scopus indexing and UGC-CARE listing practically useful, provided their institution confirms current coverage.

It is a weaker choice for work that needs a very large international general readership in a different discipline, for purely theoretical work with no historical evidence base, or for a paper whose connection to South Asia or to a worldwide process affecting South Asia is thin. Such papers are not weaker scholarship; they are simply addressed to a different conversation, and they will travel faster in a journal whose editors have announced that conversation as their own.

Similar and Related Journals

Authors considering this journal often also consider other established venues for South Asian and social history. The Indian Economic and Social History Review is the closest long-standing neighbour in economic and social history of India. Social History and Past and Present serve the broader international social-history conversation in English. Studies in History, also published from India, covers a wide historical range. The Journal of Peasant Studies addresses agrarian change and rural politics internationally, while Gender and History is a natural comparator for the gender-history strand this journal welcomes. None of these is a substitute for the others: each has its own editorial centre of gravity, and the honest way to choose is to read recent issues and ask where a manuscript's argument would be most sharply tested.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Studies in People's History?
The print ISSN is 2348-4489 and the online ISSN is 2349-7718, as recorded in the journal's own listings and in the record on this site.

Who publishes Studies in People's History?
SAGE Publications India publishes the journal in association with the Aligarh Historians Society. The number shown as publisher in this site's older stored record is a garbled field and is not a publisher name.

When did the journal begin, and how often does it appear?
It began in 2014 and appears twice a year, as a biannual journal.

Who edits the journal?
Reference listings name Irfan Habib and Shireen Moosvi as editors. Books for review are directed to Professor Shireen Moosvi in Aligarh, according to the journal's SAGE page.

What subjects does it cover?
All aspects of history in the broadest sense, with a focus on their relationship to society at large; all periods of Indian and South Asian history, plus comparative and world-historical work on processes that also affected India. Papers on classes, social groups, gender history and the National Movement are especially welcome, in the journal's own words.

Is the journal peer-reviewed and indexed?
Yes, it is a peer-reviewed journal. Reference listings report indexing in Scopus, J-Gate and UGC-CARE, and journal listings also report Emerging Sources Citation Index coverage. Confirm current coverage in the index you need before submitting.

What citation metrics does it have?
OpenAlex reports 410 works, 329 citations, a summary h-index of 8 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.09 for the source. Scopus-derived listings report an SJR of 0.108 and a CiteScore of 0.2. This site's stored record gives an h-index of 6. Figures differ by database and date, so quote them with their source.

Does it charge authors to publish?
OpenAlex lists APC prices of US$3,650 / £2,676 in its source record for this journal. That is a database record, not a publisher invoice; confirm any actual charge with SAGE or the editorial office if a charge would affect your decision.

Is it a member of any ethics body?
The journal states on its SAGE page that it is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).

How do I submit a manuscript?
Follow the journal's instructions on its SAGE Journals page, submit only with the consent of all contributing authors, and use the editorial addresses given there for correspondence. Make sure every contributor is listed as an author before you send the manuscript.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile is based on the journal's page on SAGE Journals as summarised in publisher search results, reference listings for the journal giving its editors, frequency, ISSNs and indexing, independent Scopus-derived journal listings giving SJR, CiteScore and quartile data, and OpenAlex source data resolved through the ISSN endpoint for 2348-4489 and 2349-7718. Where a field could not be verified from a fetched source — the acceptance rate and decision times — this profile says so rather than estimating them. OpenAlex's source record lists APC price information (US$3,650 / £2,676 in its record at the time of checking); an author should confirm any actual charge with SAGE before submitting.