About The Journal of Economic History

The Journal of Economic History

The Journal of Economic History (JEH) is the leading scholarly journal of economic history, published quarterly by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Economic History Association (EHA). It has appeared continuously since 1941, and its current volume — volume 86, whose third issue is the latest issue presented on Cambridge Core at the time of research for this profile — testifies to an unbroken run of more than eight decades. Its print ISSN is 0022-0507 and its online ISSN is 1471-6372, exactly the pair recorded in the Journals World record for this post. The journal's own statement of purpose, on Cambridge Core, is that it is devoted to the study of economic phenomena in historical contexts, of interest not only to economic historians but also to economists, social scientists and historians in general, with broad coverage in geographic scope, time frame and methodology, and with a book review section that keeps readers informed about new work in the field. Around that simple statement sits one of the most influential journals in the social sciences: the journal most closely associated with the quantitative transformation of economic history that came to be called cliometrics, a first-rank outlet whose articles are set, cited and argued with across economics and history departments worldwide. This profile explains the journal's history and standing, its scope topic by topic, its editorial and submission rules as the publisher states them — including its strict word limit, its 99-word abstract rule and its replication-data requirement — its attributed metrics from more than one source, and how to judge whether a manuscript, or a reading project, belongs in it.

At a glance

History and standing

The journal began in 1941 as the publication of the Economic History Association, the American professional society for the field, founded the year before. Its early decades were those of a respected but conventional historical journal. Its modern identity was formed in the 1960s and 1970s, when a generation of economists brought formal theory, statistics and counterfactual reasoning to historical questions — the approach its practitioners called the new economic history and its critics and historians call cliometrics. The reference summary fetched for this profile describes the journal's articles in exactly those terms: many are quantitative, often following the formal approaches called cliometrics or the new economic history to make statistical estimates. Work of that school published in and around the journal reshaped debates on slavery and profitability, on railroads and growth, on institutions and long-run development, and two of its leading figures later received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for that programme of research — a lineage that still colours what readers expect a JEH article to do: state a historical question precisely, assemble evidence systematically, and argue from that evidence to a conclusion that other scholars can test.

Standing, in this journal's case, is not a marketing claim but a description repeated by independent reference sources: the journal is considered one of the best economic history journals, alongside the Economic History Review, Explorations in Economic History and the European Review of Economic History. The attributed metrics set out below are consistent with that judgement — a first-quartile placement in both economics and history categories is a combination very few journals achieve, because it requires the same articles to be taken seriously by two disciplines with different reading habits. Scholars feel that dual citizenship in practice: a JEH article must persuade historians that its evidence and context are sound, and economists that its reasoning and identification are sound, and its refereeing and editing are organised to enforce both.

The association connection remains structural, not ceremonial. The journal is published for the EHA; its editors report to the membership — the Editors' Report for 2023, published in the journal and fetched for this profile, is an example of that accountability, presenting submission statistics by era, topic and geographical area for 2017–2023 and reporting on book reviews and on the journal's data policy. The same report gives a picture of the living journal that no scope statement can: submissions concentrate in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; political economy, labour and demography submissions are particularly strong, with growth, finance and agriculture also important; manuscripts on Western Europe and the United States are most common, while Asia has been an increasingly common focus. A prospective author can read the journal's appetite directly in those distributions, and a reader can see the field's centre of gravity in them from year to year.

Scope: the topics, as the publisher states them

Cambridge Core's statement of the journal's coverage, fetched for this profile, lists its topics as: economic growth; inequality; political economy; labour markets; money and banking; international trade; transportation; agriculture; education; urban growth; industrial organisation; technological change; health and demography; and the role of government and regulation. To that list the journal adds, in the same statement, a book review section that keeps readers informed about new work in economic history and related fields — a section the Editors' Report also treats as an important component of the journal, thanking its many reviewers and reminding presses to send new books to the relevant book review editor, and noting the journal's occasional extended forms: synthetic review-and-reflection articles, extended book reviews and roundtable book reviews.

Each item on the topic list corresponds to a literature a reader can watch developing in the journal's recent issues. The latest issue presented on Cambridge Core at research time illustrates the range within a single number: an article asking whether pensions can save lives, using evidence from the introduction of old-age assistance in the United Kingdom; a study of economic conditions and incarceration in the United States from Missouri records between 1850 and 1930; a hypothesis about why the wheel was not used for wagon transport in the Andes, with evidence from nineteenth-century Colombia; an analysis of anti-fascism and right-wing voting in Italy using historical evidence; a study of the public-health consequences of closing red-light districts in the Progressive Era United States; work on pronatalist policies in authoritarian regimes; a study of French colonialism and its costs across 1830–1962; and a study of the extent of the market for early American banknotes. Pensions, prisons, transport technology, voting, public health, demography, empire and money — in four continents and four centuries — in one issue. That breadth, disciplined by a common expectation of systematic evidence, is the journal's real scope, and it is why the JEH is read far outside its own subfield.

Methodologically the journal is pluralist within a standard. Its own description claims broad coverage in methodology as well as in geography and period, and its history includes narrative, archival and theoretical work; but the centre of the journal, since the cliometric transformation, is work that makes its evidence and inference auditable — data assembled from archives and official records, estimates whose construction can be followed, and, since the policy described below, replication files deposited for accepted papers. Authors whose work is purely discursive should read recent issues carefully before submitting, not because such work is barred, but because the journal's readers will ask of any article the questions its tradition teaches them to ask.

Editor, editorial office and the rules for authors

Cambridge Core's journal page, fetched for this profile, names the editor as Carolyn Moehling of the Department of Economics at Rutgers University–New Brunswick, with the editorial address at New Jersey Hall, 75 Hamilton Street, New Brunswick, New Jersey. An editorial-board page is linked from the same journal home. Readers should be aware that older reference summaries name different editors — the encyclopaedia entry fetched for this profile lists Ann Carlos and William Collins, which reflects an earlier editorship — and for any practical purpose (a submission, a query, a review copy) the current Cambridge Core masthead is the source to trust, since editorships of this journal rotate among senior scholars in the field. This profile follows the publisher's current listing and flags the superseded one precisely so that a reader who meets the older names elsewhere understands what they are seeing.

The publisher's style sheet for the journal, fetched in full for this profile, is unusually specific, and its main rules are worth recording because they shape every article in the journal. The JEH maintains a strict limit of 14,000 words for all articles, including references, tables and figures; online appendices can be any length. Initial submissions may be PDF files or in other formats, but final manuscripts must be submitted as Word documents. The typescript order is title page, abstract, text, references, tables, figures and appendix, double-spaced throughout, including block quotations, footnotes and appendices, with standard margins and fonts and no automatic hyphenation or right-justification. The title page carries the title, author names, institutional affiliations, mailing addresses and e-mail addresses, with acknowledgements as a separate paragraph on that page. The abstract is typed at the head of the first page of the text — with the title repeated above it but the authors' names withheld from that page — double-spaced, indented from both margins, and subject to an absolute maximum of 99 words, counting all segments of hyphenated words; the abstract must not be recapitulated word for word in the text, and shorter pieces such as notes and comments are submitted without an abstract. House style further requires that articles do not use contractions, and do not use indented or bulleted outlines or numbered lists of hypotheses, alternatives or conclusions. A journal that specifies its abstracts to the word and bans the numbered-hypothesis format of the economics working paper is telling authors something real about its culture: the JEH writes for historians as well as economists, in continuous prose, at a length that respects a quarterly's page budget.

Above the style rules sits a substantive policy that authors must plan for from the start. As the Editors' Report records, the EHA board of trustees approved at its 2013 meetings a policy making publication conditional on archiving the data sufficient to replicate the results in accepted articles; the authors of all new submissions from 1 January 2016 onward that were accepted have been required to post data and replication files, through a branded page at openICPSR, to maintain and advance the journal's efforts to ensure transparency and scholarly integrity. In practice, a JEH submission is therefore two objects, not one: the article, and the deposit that lets a stranger rebuild its tables. Authors who cannot share their underlying material for legal or archival reasons need to resolve that question with the editorial office early, because the requirement is a condition of publication, not a suggestion appended to it.

What this profile does not state is a submission fee, an acceptance rate or a review timetable for the journal, because none of those figures was published in the foreground sources fetched for this profile; they are recorded here as not publicly disclosed in those sources, and a prospective author should take the current position from the journal's Cambridge Core information pages at the time of submission. The journal is a subscription journal with open-access articles within it — Cambridge Core's journal page is badged as containing open access, and lists open-access articles among its sections — so individual articles may be freely readable under the publisher's current arrangements even though the journal as a whole is not an open-access title.

Indexing and bibliometric footprint

For this journal, unlike some others in this batch, the bibliometric record is rich — and it differs between sources in ways this profile reports rather than smoothing over. The SCImago-derived listing fetched for this profile, in a page updated in June 2025 and based on Scopus data, gives the journal an h-index of 75, a SCImago Journal Rank of 2.292, an impact score of 2.52, an overall rank of 1,114 in that listing, a best quartile of Q1, and Q1 placements in each of Economics and Econometrics, Economics, Econometrics and Finance (miscellaneous) and History, with publisher Cambridge University Press, country United Kingdom, ISSNs 1471-6372 and 0022-0507, and coverage from 1941 to 2025. A second aggregator summary of the same SCImago data gives a closely similar SJR of about 1.95 to 2.33 depending on the year and snapshot consulted — a reminder that SJR is an annual figure, and any single value must carry its year with it. Older impact factors tell the same story of a strong but not mass-circulation field journal: the encyclopaedia entry records a 2018 impact factor of 1.683 (and 1.101 for 2016), while a journal-metrics listing fetched records a more recent Journal Impact Factor of about 2.3; those figures are reported here attributed to their listings and years, and a reader who needs the current Journal Citation Reports figure should take it from that source directly.

OpenAlex, fetched directly by ISSN for this profile, presents the same journal through a different counting window: about 13,984 works, about 139,255 citations, an h-index of 150 and an i10-index of 2,061, with a two-year mean citedness of about 2.07 and the source country listed as GB. The gap between an h-index of 75 in the Scopus-based listing and 150 in OpenAlex is large but explicable in kind: the two systems count different citing literatures over different windows — OpenAlex's graph reaches further into books, older citations and citing sources outside the Scopus journal set, which matters greatly for a journal whose influence runs through monographs and through eight decades of back volumes. Neither figure is presented here as the true one; each is presented as its own system's measure, which is the only honest way to report either.

One further number needs a warning label, because it arrives from this site's own data. The thin duplicate record discussed below carries an h-index of 80 for this journal in its template text. That figure matches neither the Scopus-based listing (75) nor OpenAlex (150) fetched for this profile, and it illustrates why this profile's rule — every metric attributed to a fetched source, and nothing carried over from an existing template — matters on a record for a journal of this prominence.

A note on the duplicate record for this journal

Journals World holds a second live record for this same journal: post 7952, slug journal-of-economic-history, titled Journal of Economic History. It was verified by direct fetch at two separate moments for this batch, and the evidence is exact: that record carries the same ISSN pair, 1471-6372 and 0022-0507, the same 1941 starting date in its coverage statement (1941–2026 in its template text) and the same Cambridge publishing lineage; it differs from the present record chiefly in dropping the word The from the title and in its template claim of publication by a bare number in place of a publisher name — a structured-field defect in that record, noted in this profile's reporting. At verification, post 7952 was thin (about 266 visible words, no depth marker), so it is not a case of two deep profiles competing: this profile is published on the present record, post 331249, and the pair is reported to the directory's operators as a confirmed duplicate pair with shared ISSNs, for them to resolve under their standing merge practice. Nothing in this profile has been published on post 7952, and no merge has been carried out by the author of this profile.

For completeness, the present record's own stored description was also checked against the official sources. Its publisher statement — Cambridge University Press — is correct, and its ISSN pair is correct and correctly ordered as print and online. No conflict was found in this record's core fields; the conflicts in this journal's corner of the directory sit in the duplicate record, as described above, and in the difference between its unverified template h-index and the attributed figures given in this profile.

Is the JEH the right journal for your work — or your reading?

For authors, the JEH is the right ambition when the work is economic history with systematic evidence, of interest beyond its own archive or country, and capable of surviving scrutiny from both economists and historians. The practical tests follow from the rules above: can the argument be made, completely, within 14,000 words including everything; can it be summarised, honestly, in 99 words; and can its results be replicated from a deposited archive? A manuscript that fails the third test is not ready for this journal whatever its other merits. A manuscript that is primarily a contribution to economic theory, to contemporary policy or to narrative history without an economic question at its centre will usually belong elsewhere, however good it is, and the journal's submission distributions — by era, topic and region, published in its own Editors' Reports — are the best publicly available guide to what the journal in fact takes.

For readers, the JEH is the right first source for the current state of quantitative and analytical economic history: long-run growth and inequality, the economics of institutions, money, trade, labour, demography and health in historical settings, and the book-review conversation of the field. Its back run, from 1941 on JSTOR and through Cambridge's archive, is also a research object in itself — the place to watch a discipline change its methods over eighty years. Readers approaching it from economics should expect historical depth and archival specificity that a general economics journal would not demand; readers approaching it from history should expect formal argument and statistical evidence that a general history journal would not demand. That double expectation is the journal's identity, and the reason a profile of it must describe both halves.

Frequently asked questions

Who publishes The Journal of Economic History? Cambridge University Press, on behalf of the Economic History Association, as stated on Cambridge Core. The association owns the journal; the press publishes it.

What are its ISSNs? 0022-0507 in print and 1471-6372 online, as stated on Cambridge Core and in the record for this post.

How often does it appear, and since when? Quarterly, four issues a year, since 1941. Cambridge Core presented volume 86, issue 3 as a current issue at the time of research for this profile.

Who is the editor? Cambridge Core's current listing names Carolyn Moehling of Rutgers University–New Brunswick. Older reference summaries naming Ann Carlos and William Collins reflect an earlier editorship.

What are the main submission rules? A strict 14,000-word limit including references, tables and figures; an abstract of at most 99 words; final manuscripts in Word; and, for accepted papers, a mandatory deposit of data and replication files through openICPSR, as a condition of publication under the policy in force for submissions from 2016.

What are its rankings? In the SCImago-derived listing fetched for this profile (Scopus-based, updated June 2025): Q1 in Economics and Econometrics and in History, SJR 2.292, h-index 75. In OpenAlex: h-index 150, about 13,984 works and about 139,255 citations. Each figure belongs to its own system and is attributed as such in the text.

Is there a duplicate of this record? Yes — post 7952, under the title Journal of Economic History without the word The, carries the identical ISSN pair and is confirmed in this profile as a duplicate pair, thin at verification, and reported for resolution. This profile is published only on post 331249.

Sources and verification note

This profile is anchored to the live Journals World record for post 331249 (title, slug, publisher Cambridge University Press and the ISSN pair 0022-0507 and 1471-6372) and to foreground-fetched sources: Cambridge Core's journal home (ISSN pair, current editor and address, aims and scope statement in full, current volume and issue contents); the journal's style sheet on Cambridge (the 14,000-word limit, abstract rules, manuscript order and house rules); the journal's Editors' Report for 2023 (submission distributions by era, topic and geography, book-review practice, and the replication-data policy with its 2013 approval and 2016 application through openICPSR); the reference entry for the journal (history from 1941, quarterly frequency, cliometrics characterisation, earlier editors and dated impact factors); the SCImago-derived listings fetched (h-index, SJR, quartiles, categories, coverage); and an OpenAlex source lookup by ISSN for the works, citations and h-index figures attributed to OpenAlex in the text. The duplicate record, post 7952, was fetched directly at two separate moments and its ISSN evidence is quoted from those fetches. No fee, acceptance rate or review timetable is claimed for the journal, because none was published in the sources fetched.