Symmetry: Culture and Science

About Symmetry: Culture and Science

Symmetry: Culture and Science — Journal Profile

Symmetry: Culture and Science is an interdisciplinary journal built around a single, surprisingly powerful idea: that symmetry — and its relatives asymmetry, dissymmetry, broken symmetry, proportion, rhythm and invariance — is a thread that runs through mathematics, the natural sciences, art, architecture, music, biology and the study of culture, and that following the thread across those fields teaches each of them something about itself. It is published in Budapest, Hungary, by the Symmetrion, the institute of the Symmetrology Foundation, and it has appeared since 1990. Its print ISSN is 0865-4824 and its electronic ISSN is 2226-1877, the pair recorded on this JournalsWorld record and printed in the journal's own front matter. It must not be confused with the open-access journal Symmetry published by MDPI, a different and much younger title in mathematics and physics with its own ISSN; the Budapest journal predates it by nearly two decades, covers a far wider cultural territory, and belongs to the international symmetry-studies movement that grew up around the International Symmetry Association and its festivals. Papers in the journal are published in English, are addressed deliberately to a broad non-specialist readership, and are expected — in the journal's own instruction to contributors — to deal with symmetry in a concrete, not only metaphorical, sense.

Origins: a movement first, then a journal

The journal grew out of an event. In August 1989 Budapest hosted the first of the Symmetry of Structure symposium and exhibition series, held around the Buda Royal Castle and the Hungarian National Gallery; that gathering gave birth to the international society for the interdisciplinary study of symmetry — known in its early years as ISIS-Symmetry and today as the International Symmetry Association — and the journal followed as the movement's periodical, published from 1990. The people behind it institutionalised quickly. The Symmetrion, the Budapest institute that publishes the journal, was founded in 1991 in the name of the International Symmetry Foundation by György Darvas and Dénes Nagy; it was financed by that foundation until 2005, belonged to the International Symmetry Association from 2006 to 2008, and has since 2008 been financed by the Symmetrology Foundation. Darvas — a physicist and philosopher, a senior scientist associated with the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Eötvös Loránd University — directed the Symmetrion and edited the journal, and his name stands on its issues as editor across its modern run, including the 2019 volume consulted for this profile. The same movement produced the Symmetry Festivals, large gatherings at which scientists, artists, designers and engineers met around exhibitions and lectures, and local Symmetry Circles in cities around the world. The journal is best understood as the printed organ of that whole enterprise, which is why its pages move so freely between a crystallographer's problem, a composer's proportions and a biologist's morphology.

Darvas died at the end of 2023. The International Symmetry Association's memorial notice records him as a founder of the association and one of the first editors of this journal, and credits his life's work to the interdisciplinary study of symmetry in all its aspects, including the festivals and events that surrounded the journal. His two best-known books — Symmetry: Cultural-Historical and Ontological Aspects of Science-Arts Relations (2007) and Hypersymmetry (2020) — state the programme the journal pursued: symmetry as a meeting point of the sciences and the arts, with a history, an ontology and a method. Who holds the editorship now could not be verified from the sources consulted for this profile, and authors should take the current editor's name and the current submission address from the journal's own website, at journal-scs.symmetry.hu, rather than from older printed issues.

Aims and scope

The journal's instructions for contributors give its scope with unusual precision, and they are worth following closely because they define what referees will look for. Contributions are welcomed from the broadest international circles and from all scholarly and artistic fields where symmetry considerations play an important role. Papers should be original and interdisciplinary in character, dealing with symmetry in a concrete — not only metaphorical — sense, as the journal's aims and scope set out. The journal has a special interest in how distant fields of art, science and technology may influence one another in respect of symmetry. Papers should be addressed to a broad non-specialist public, in a form that encourages dialogue between disciplines without sacrificing clarity and rigour; where complicated scientific concepts appear, their rigorous presentation must be preceded by an introductory part taking an intuitive approach. Research papers, educational papers, historical surveys and reviews are all welcome. New associations and speculative remarks may be included, provided their tentative nature is made plain; hackneyed quotations and illustrations are discouraged, while rarely mentioned sources, new connections and hidden dimensions are welcomed. The festival tradition behind the journal names the wider family of welcome topics: all kinds of interpretation, application and representation of symmetry, asymmetry, dissymmetry, broken symmetry and antisymmetry, and related terms such as invariance, harmony, proportion, rhythm, conservation and self-organisation, with special interest in the relation of symmetry to beauty and to truth.

In practice, OpenAlex's topic profile of the journal's published contents shows where that scope lands: its largest clusters fall in architecture and art history studies, mathematics and its applications, art, technology and culture, and the history and theory of mathematics. That spread — buildings, proofs, pictures and the history of all three — is the journal in miniature. A typical issue might contain a study of symmetrical structures in architecture, an analysis of symmetry groups in a physical or chemical problem, a historical paper on proportion in Renaissance art, a piece on symmetry in music or in folk art and ornament, a biological paper on morphology or handedness, and an educational paper on teaching symmetry in schools. What unifies them is method, not subject: each paper must show symmetry at work, concretely, in its material — as structure, as constraint, as generative rule or as historical idea — and each must explain itself to readers whose home field is one of the others.

Symmetry at work: the territory in examples

Concrete examples show the journal's range better than any scope sentence. In mathematics and the physical sciences, its papers treat symmetry as structure: groups that describe crystals and molecules, symmetries and conservation principles in physics, tilings and patterns, and the mathematics of ornament. In biology, symmetry is a fact of bodies — bilateral and radial organisation, left-right asymmetry in development, the spiral geometries of shells and plants — and papers ask what those forms mean for evolution and function. In architecture and design, proportion systems, facade rhythms, structural symmetries and the geometries of historical buildings form a long-running strand, including thematic issues such as the 2019 Bauhaus centenary issue, which examined symmetries and proportions in modern architectural composition under a guest editor. In art and music, the journal covers pattern and perspective in painting, symmetry in folk art and textiles, serial and proportional structures in composition, and the playful mathematics of figures such as ambigrams. In the humanities, it publishes the history of all of this: how symmetry was understood from Greek symmetria through the Renaissance to modern physics, and how the concept migrated between cultures. Educational papers close the loop, reporting how symmetry can be taught — in classrooms, museums and design studios — so that students meet one idea wearing many disciplinary clothes. A submission that could sit in only one specialist journal unchanged probably belongs there instead; a submission that needs readers from three fields to be understood is the kind this journal was founded to print.

Editorial practice and how to submit

The journal's contributor instructions describe a deliberately old-fashioned, editor-centred route. Manuscripts should be submitted directly to the editor — by e-mail attachment, which the instructions call the preferred route — rather than through a submission portal. All papers and notes are published in English and should be submitted in that language, though the journal also reviews and annotates non-English publications. Papers are refereed: the journal's publication ethics and malpractice statement describes a single-blind review process, in which authors' names are open to reviewers while reviewers' names are kept closed to authors unless a reviewer chooses otherwise; the editor of the issue guards the objectivity of the judgements, reviewers should have no conflict of interest, reviewed articles are treated confidentially, and reviewers may point out relevant published work a paper has missed. The same ethics statement commits the publisher and editors to identifying and preventing the publication of work involving research misconduct, to handling allegations appropriately, and to publishing corrections, clarifications, retractions and apologies when needed. Copyright is addressed through a transfer form downloadable from the journal's instructions page, and the statement directs readers to the journal's subscription and purchase pages for access arrangements. Authors should expect a human-scale process: this is a small institute's journal, not a production line, and its instructions read accordingly — clarity of exposition is treated as a scholarly duty, not a courtesy.

Thematic issues are part of the journal's working method. Gathering a group of papers around one problem — a centenary, a material, a method — lets the journal do in a single issue what its scope promises across a volume: put a crystallographer, an art historian and a teacher in one another's reading paths. Guest editors drawn from the symmetry community frame such issues, and the association's boards stand behind the edition, as the journal's front matter records. Authors with a cluster of related papers, for instance from a workshop or a festival session, can therefore approach the journal with a themed proposal in a way that most general journals would not entertain.

Access, subscriptions and preservation

The journal is a subscription title in print and online rather than an open-access journal: a search of the Directory of Open Access Journals made for this profile returned no listing for either ISSN. Its printed issues carry subscription prices in their front matter; the 2019 issue consulted listed an annual subscription of €120, with reduced rates of €90 for individual members of the International Symmetry Association and €60 for student members, and institutional members directed to contact the Symmetrion — figures stated here as published in that issue, since current prices could not be verified from the sources consulted and should be checked on the journal's subscription page. Crossref services for the journal are sponsored by the University Library and Archives of Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, and the journal's articles carry DOIs under the prefix 10.26830, as its 2019 issues show. Its ethics statement records the print archive's preservation in several major libraries, naming the Library of Congress and the Hungarian National Library, with electronic backup held on the journal's domain server, at the publisher and with the hosting webmaster. The Symmetrion also maintains a specialised library, the Symmetrion's SYMMETROTHECA collection of symmetry literature — described by the institute as a unique gathering, in one place, of symmetry-related publications scattered across disciplinary journals — and it invites authors to donate copies of their symmetry work to enrich it; the journal and the library are two faces of the same collecting impulse.

Metrics and standing

Each figure here is attributed to its source. OpenAlex, resolving the journal through its ISSN endpoint to source S4210175996, recorded at the time of checking 393 works and 415 citations for the journal, with a summary h-index of 8, an i10-index of 8 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.25. The SCImago-based data behind the earlier JournalsWorld record listed an h-index of 4 and placed the journal in its top quartile band in that data (Q1), with Scopus coverage shown for scattered recent years. These are small numbers by the standards of big science journals, and they should be read in context: this is a niche, interdisciplinary humanities-science journal whose influence travels through books, exhibitions, festivals, teaching and the small worldwide community of symmetry researchers rather than through mass citation. Its standing rests on things metrics capture poorly — a continuous run since 1990, a defined intellectual programme maintained by a dedicated institute, an association and festival series around it, and a readership that spans art and science in a way few journals attempt. Authors with a genuinely interdisciplinary symmetry paper often have a short list of plausible homes; this journal is usually at the top of it, and that fit — not a citation score — is the right reason to submit here.

Not the other Symmetry

One confusion is worth ending plainly, because it reaches this journal's readers and cataloguers regularly. The open-access journal titled simply Symmetry, published by the Swiss publisher MDPI since 2009 and devoted mainly to mathematics, physics and related sciences, is a different journal: different publisher, different country, different ISSN, different scope and a different editorial world. The Budapest journal — Symmetry: Culture and Science, ISSNs 0865-4824 and 2226-1877, published by the Symmetrion since 1990 — is the older title and the one this record describes. Citations, subscriptions and submissions intended for one title should not be sent to the other, and database records that blend the two should be treated as errors and corrected at the source.

Frequently asked questions

What are the ISSNs of Symmetry: Culture and Science?

Its print ISSN is 0865-4824 and its electronic ISSN is 2226-1877, as printed in the journal's own front matter.

Who publishes the journal, and where?

The Symmetrion, the Budapest institute of the Symmetrology Foundation, publishes it from 29 Eötvös Street, Budapest, Hungary. The institute was founded in 1991 by György Darvas and Dénes Nagy.

When did the journal start?

In 1990, growing out of the 1989 Symmetry of Structure symposium and exhibition in Budapest that also gave rise to the international symmetry association whose movement the journal serves.

What does the journal publish?

Original, interdisciplinary research papers, educational papers, historical surveys and reviews in which symmetry — in a concrete, not merely metaphorical sense — plays an important role, across science, art, architecture, mathematics, biology and culture, written in English for a broad non-specialist readership.

How do I submit?

Directly to the editor, by e-mail attachment as the preferred route, following the journal's instructions for contributors on its website. Review is single-blind, per its ethics statement. The current editor's name could not be verified for this profile — the founding editor, György Darvas, died at the end of 2023 — so check the journal site for the current addressee.

Is the journal open access?

No — it is a subscription journal in print and online, and a DOAJ search for this profile returned no listing. Subscription prices printed in its 2019 issue were €120 a year, with €90 and €60 rates for association members and students; current prices should be checked on its subscription page.

What do its citation metrics look like?

OpenAlex (source S4210175996, at checking) recorded 393 works, 415 citations and an h-index of 8; SCImago-based data listed an h-index of 4. It is a small, specialised interdisciplinary journal, and the figures are each attributed to their source.

Sources consulted for this profile: the journal's instructions for contributors and publication ethics statement (journal-scs.symmetry.hu / symmetry.hu); the Symmetrion's own institutional history page; the Symmetry Festival 2003 history (1989 symposium, journal from 1990); a 2019 issue's front matter (editor, address, ISSNs, subscription rates, DOI prefix); the International Symmetry Association's memorial notice for György Darvas; OpenAlex source record resolved through the ISSN endpoint (S4210175996); DOAJ search API (no listing returned). Figures are stated as at the time of checking.