Treatises and Documents, Journal of Ethnic Studies

About Treatises and Documents, Journal of Ethnic Studies

Treatises and Documents, Journal of Ethnic Studies — Journal Profile

Treatises and Documents, Journal of Ethnic Studies — in Slovenian, Razprave in gradivo: Revija za narodnostna vprašanja — is the journal of the Institute for Ethnic Studies (Inštitut za narodnostna vprašanja) in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and it has been published by that institute since 1960 as the specialist Slovenian journal for ethnic questions. Its print ISSN is 0354-0286 and its online ISSN is 1854-5181, the pair printed on its articles and carried on this JournalsWorld record. Two issues appear each year, usually in June and December, and its current volumes are distributed internationally through the Sciendo platform, where its articles carry DOIs under the prefix 10.2478/tdjes. It is a small journal with an unusually long memory: the institute behind it traces its own ancestry to a minority institute founded in Ljubljana in 1925, and the journal's subject — the position of national and ethnic minorities, above all in the Alpine-Adriatic-Pannonian space — has been its single, steady concern for more than six decades.

Identity and history

The journal cannot be separated from its institute. The Institute for Ethnic Studies describes itself, in the Slovenian national research information system, as the successor of the Minority Institute that worked in Ljubljana from 1925 to 1941 as one of the first research institutions of its kind in the world, studying the status of Slovenes in neighbouring countries and of the German and Hungarian minorities in Slovenia. Suppressed under occupation, the work was refounded in 1944 within the Scientific Institute of the Liberation Front's executive committee, became the Institute for the Study of Border Questions in 1948 — the year from which the Institute for Ethnic Studies dates its continuous existence — and worked within the University of Ljubljana until 1956, when it became an independent scientific institution. The institute calls itself the oldest research institute in minority and ethnic studies in Europe, and since 1960 it has published Razprave in gradivo — Treatises and Documents — as, in its own words, the only Slovenian specialist journal for ethnic issues.

That origin explains the journal's character. It was founded in a country whose own national question was a border question: Slovenes lived, and live, as minorities in Italy, Austria, Hungary and Croatia, while Italians, Hungarians and others lived as minorities inside Slovenia. The journal's historic core topics follow from that map — the Slovene national question; the position and protection of national and ethnic minorities in Slovenia and of Slovene communities abroad; ethnicity, ethnic relations and nationalism; borders; migration and integration policy; and the international regulation of minority rights. As Slovenia moved from Yugoslav republic to independent state, into the Council of Europe and then the European bloc, the journal's pages followed the same questions into new legal and political settings, and its recent volumes add the vocabulary of a wider Europe: memory politics, discrimination, citizenship, multiculturalism, Roma rights, migration management and the treatment of refugees and new minorities.

The bilingual title is itself a statement of method. Articles appear in Slovenian or English (and occasionally other languages of the region), with titles, abstracts and keywords given in both Slovenian and English, so that scholarship written for a domestic debate is simultaneously addressed to the international field. Recent article PDFs show the house style plainly: the bilingual masthead, both ISSNs, the institute's Ljubljana address at Erjavčeva 26, the DOI, and an open access licence line — the apparatus of a small institute journal that has professionalised its production through its platform partnership without changing its remit.

Scope and subjects

The journal's platform page states its remit directly: it aims to advance the multidisciplinary study of ethnic and minority issues, publishing high-quality articles especially on racial and ethnic relations, ethnic identity, nationalism, xenophobia, the protection of ethnic, national, linguistic, religious and other minorities, migration, discrimination, citizenship and multiculturalism. Its particular — but not exclusive — interest is the Alpine-Adriatic-Pannonian area: Albania, Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Italy, Germany (especially its south), Hungary, Kosovo, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia, with North Macedonia and Bulgaria also named as interesting cases. The editorial policy also welcomes excellent contributions from other parts of the world, and the journal's recent contents honour that openness, carrying work on subjects well beyond the home region when the ethnic-studies relevance is clear.

The approaches welcomed are as broad as the topics: historical and comparative studies, policy debates and evaluations, and theoretical work all appear. A reader sampling recent issues meets, side by side, a comparative demo-geographic study of the first wave of COVID-19 in Slovenia's border and minority regions; an analysis of how distance learning during quarantine affected Roma pupils; a study of why Croats migrate to Austria, built on interviews with the migrants themselves; an examination of gender, sexuality and the biological idea of the nation in thirty years of Slovenian political debate; and work on the memory landscape of Nazi-era victims in bilingual Austrian Carinthia, built on a digital memorial database. OpenAlex's topic assignment for the journal, at checking time, matches that mix: its largest topic groups were minority rights and languages, diaspora, migration and transnational identity, multilingual education and policy, linguistic and sociocultural studies, and the Balkans in history, politics and society. This is ethnic studies practised close to the ground — legal, historical, demographic, educational and anthropological at once.

Editorial information and publishing practice

The journal is edited at the Institute for Ethnic Studies in Ljubljana and published by the institute, with two issues a year, usually in June and December; its issue numbering runs continuously from its founding — issue 85 appeared in 2020, issue 92 in 2024, issue 95 in 2025 and issue 96 in 2026 in the copies examined. Distribution and typesetting for the current series are handled through Sciendo, De Gruyter's platform for institute and society journals, which is why some aggregator records name Sciendo, or Poland, in the publisher field: Sciendo is the platform and service provider, while the publisher of record remains the Ljubljana institute. That distinction matters for citations and for the corrections note attached to this profile.

Articles in the current series are published open access under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0, as printed on the journal's PDFs), with copyright held by the authors. No article processing charge could be verified from the sources fetched for this profile, and no fee is quoted here; authors for whom charges would matter should confirm the position with the editorial office. Likewise, no verified statement of review model or turnaround time was found in the material checked, so this profile does not claim one: what the published record does show is a journal whose contributions are full research articles with scholarly apparatus, bilingual abstracts and named institutional affiliations, produced to conventional peer-reviewed standards for its field. Prospective authors should read the current author information on the journal's platform page before submitting, and should note the journal's expectation that work speak to ethnic and minority questions — ideally, though not necessarily, with a connection to its home region.

Metrics and indexing

This is a small-circulation humanities and social-science journal, and its indicators should be read at that scale. OpenAlex (source S4387291157, resolved through its ISSN endpoint at checking time) counted 118 works and 189 citations, an h-index of 6, an i10-index of 1 and a two-year mean citedness of 0.5; its record for the journal begins in 2019, which reflects that database's coverage of the journal rather than the journal's own history, and it counted between 15 and 21 works a year for 2022–2025 — consistent with two issues a year of a journal of this size. Scopus-based summaries tell the complementary story: this JournalsWorld record's source data reported Scopus coverage spanning 2015–2025 with an h-index of 8, and aggregator summaries of the Scopus and SCImago data report a CiteScore of 1, an SJR of 0.184 and category quartiles led by Cultural Studies at Q2, with Anthropology and Demography at Q3. Those figures are quoted here with their sources and should be checked against the current Scopus and SCImago releases before being used in any formal evaluation. The journal's DOIs, bilingual metadata and platform distribution give its articles a visibility well beyond its print origins, which is the realistic basis of its citation life: it is the reference point for Slovenian and Alpine-Adriatic minority questions, and work published here is found by the scholars who work on those questions, whatever the aggregate indicators say.

Who should publish here, and who should read it

For authors, the fit question is unusually clear. A manuscript belongs here if its centre of gravity is ethnicity — minority protection law, language rights, ethnic identity and boundary-making, migration and integration, nationalism, or the history of any of these — and it gains strength if it engages the journal's home region or compares it with somewhere else. Worked examples from the recent backfile include studies of minority-language schooling in Slovenian Istria, of Roma education under emergency conditions, of Croatian labour migration to Austria, and of commemorative landscapes in Carinthia: empirical, regionally grounded, and framed for an international ethnic-studies readership. For readers — researchers in ethnic studies, minority law, Balkan and Central European studies, migration studies and Slovene studies — the journal is a primary source as much as a secondary one: sixty years of continuous publication from the region's oldest minority-research institute make its backfile a record of how minority questions in this part of Europe have been asked, and answered, across three political eras.

Similar journals in this directory

Readers working on belonging, minorities and migration may also consult Appartenances & Altértés (ISSN 1953-7476), the French journal of belonging and otherness published by the Urmis research unit; Etnosfera (ISSN 1844-5047 and 2601-8497), the Romanian Academy's social-science journal working across sociology, anthropology and ethnic studies; the European Bulletin of Himalayan Research (ISSN 0943-8254 and 2823-6114) for multidisciplinary regional social science; and Inclusivity (ISSN 3119-9380 and 3119-9410), the Romanian journal of identity, integration and inclusion studies. Each has its own full profile in this directory.

Frequently asked questions

What are the journal's ISSNs? Print ISSN 0354-0286 and online ISSN 1854-5181, printed on its articles and recorded here.

Who publishes Treatises and Documents? The Institute for Ethnic Studies (Inštitut za narodnostna vprašanja) in Ljubljana, Slovenia, which has published it since 1960. Sciendo is its publishing platform, not its publisher.

What does the Slovenian title mean? Razprave in gradivo means "Treatises and Documents"; the subtitle Revija za narodnostna vprašanja means "Journal for Nationality (Ethnic) Questions".

How often does it appear? Twice a year, usually in June and December, with continuous issue numbering since 1960.

Is it open access? Its current articles are published open access under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0, as printed on the article PDFs. Whether a charge applies could not be verified from the sources fetched; confirm with the editorial office.

What subjects does it cover? Ethnic and minority issues in multidisciplinary perspective — minority protection, ethnic relations and identity, nationalism, migration, discrimination, citizenship, language rights and multiculturalism — with a particular interest in the Alpine-Adriatic-Pannonian region.

A closer look at the recent backfile

The journal's recent issues repay a closer description, because they show how a remit written in 1960 absorbs the questions of the 2020s. Issue 85 (2020) carried the comparative demo-geographic study of COVID-19 spread and counter-measures in Slovenia, with special attention to regional differences and border areas — ethnic studies meeting epidemiology at exactly the point where the journal is strongest, the border municipality where minority populations live. The same issue carried the study of Roma pupils and distance learning during quarantine, an early record of how an emergency measure landed unequally on a marginalised group. Issue 87 (2021) included the analysis of nation, gender and sexuality in Slovenian political debate, reading abortion rights, assisted reproduction and partnership equality as arguments about what the nation is. Issue 89 (2022) turned to the classroom from the other side, reporting pupils' and parents' views of the schools with Italian as the language of instruction in Slovenian Istria — the educational machinery of minority protection examined through the families who use it.

Issue 91 (2023) opened the lens to migration out of the region, asking why Croats move to Austria and what part networks, wages, the pandemic and the opening of the Austrian labour market played in their decisions. Issue 92 (2024) ranged from a polyvagal-theory reading of ethnic distance and well-being in Bosnia and Herzegovina, to war and peace photography in Asian news coverage of the war in Ukraine, to the DERLA digital memorial landscape of Nazi-era victims in Austrian Carinthia. Issue 93 (2024) carried the anthropological study of olfactory stereotyping and anti-Roma racism in Slovenian sources from the nineteenth century onward. Issue 95 (2025) included work on how second-generation Bosnian migrants in Serbia and Montenegro negotiate the ethnic labels a post-conflict landscape hands them, and issue 96 (2026) was in production at checking time with contents that included technical work far from the journal's core — a reminder that small institute journals sometimes carry the occasional out-of-field article, and that readers should judge the journal by its centre of gravity, which remains firmly ethnic and minority studies. Read together, these issues describe a journal doing three things at once: documenting its home region's minority life, theorising ethnicity for an international field, and keeping a Slovenian-language scholarly conversation in print alongside the English one.

The journal in its research landscape

Slovenia's ethnic-studies infrastructure is compact, and this journal sits at its centre. The publishing institute is the country's reference institution for minority research — its researchers serve as the experts journalists, ministries and international monitoring bodies consult on the Italian and Hungarian national communities in Slovenia, on the Roma, on Slovenes in the neighbouring states, and on the newer immigrant communities that post-1991 Slovenia has acquired. The journal is where much of that expertise reaches print in article form, which gives its contents a policy adjacency that purely academic titles lack: studies published here are written by, and for, a community that includes the people who draft minority legislation, design bilingual schooling and report to European monitoring frameworks. For an outside researcher, that makes the backfile doubly useful — as scholarship, and as a documentary record of how a small state at the meeting point of the Germanic, Romance, Slavic and Hungarian worlds has thought about the minorities within and beyond its borders across the Yugoslav, transitional and European periods. The journal's presence on an international platform, with DOIs, English metadata and open access PDFs, is what carries that record beyond the Slovenian-reading world; its Slovenian-language articles remain, deliberately, part of the deal, since a journal of a national minority-research institute serves its own scholarly public as well as the international one.

A final practical note for librarians and bibliographers: catalogue this journal under both of its titles. Records under the Slovenian title Razprave in gradivo and records under the English title Treatises and Documents, Journal of Ethnic Studies describe one and the same serial, with one pair of ISSNs and one continuous run of issue numbering from 1960; treating them as two journals, or treating the Sciendo platform as the publisher, are the two errors this profile most wants to prevent.