Verwaltung

About Verwaltung

About Die Verwaltung

Die Verwaltung — stored in this directory under the short title Verwaltung — is a German-language quarterly journal for administrative law and administrative science, published in Berlin by Duncker & Humblot GmbH. Its full subtitle, as given by the publisher, is “Journal for Administrative Law and Administrative Science,” and it is one of the established specialist periodicals through which German public-law scholarship discusses how the state administers, how administrative action is controlled by law, and how public administration changes over time. The journal carries print ISSN 0042-4498 and online ISSN 1865-5211. It appears four times a year, with roughly 616 pages per volume, in German with English abstracts, and the publisher’s archive on its own site runs continuously from volume 1 in 1968 to volume 59 in 2026. Because the readership is primarily the German-speaking community of administrative lawyers, judges, civil servants and administrative scientists, the journal’s centre of gravity is doctrinal and institutional rather than generalist: it is a place for long, carefully argued studies of Verwaltungsrecht (administrative law) and Verwaltungswissenschaft (administrative science), not a rapid-publication outlet.

That identity matters for anyone deciding whether to submit, subscribe or cite. A manuscript written for an English-language, empirically driven public administration audience will usually not fit here without substantial reframing, whereas a study that works through German or European administrative doctrine, case law or institutional practice in depth is exactly the kind of contribution the journal exists to publish. The sections below set out the journal’s history, editorship, contents pattern, indexing, metrics, costs and submission route, based on the publisher’s own journal page, on OpenAlex source data resolved through the journal’s ISSN, and on secondary reporting of SCImago data, with each figure attributed to the source that produced it.

History and Development

Die Verwaltung was founded in 1968 by Ernst Forsthoff, one of the most influential German public lawyers of the post-war period, who edited the journal until his death in 1974. The founding date places the journal in the period when the Federal Republic’s administrative state was being rebuilt on constitutional foundations: the Basic Law of 1949 had created a Rechtsstaat framework in which administrative action is bound by statute and subject to review by independent administrative courts, and a specialist journal was needed in which the doctrine of that system could be developed systematically. Forsthoff’s own scholarship on the administration of services and on the constitutional position of the executive shaped the journal’s early character, and the title has retained a doctrinal, conceptually ambitious profile ever since.

The journal has appeared without interruption since 1968. The publisher’s back-issue listing shows four issues for every year from 1968 through 2025, with volume 59 opening in 2026 — a continuity that few specialist law journals can match. Over those decades the subject matter has widened with the administrative state itself. Early volumes concentrated on the classical questions of administrative organisation, administrative procedure and the legal protection of the citizen against the state. Later volumes necessarily took up Europeanisation — the effect of European law on national administration — as well as privatisation and regulation, environmental and planning administration, police and security law, digital administration and the administrative response to crises such as the pandemic, a theme the publisher records for a themed issue in 2021 on lessons for the health system. The journal’s format has also modernised: alongside the print edition it is published online through the publisher’s eLibrary, individual articles are released online first, and the complete run is preserved through Portico, the digital preservation service named by the publisher.

Duncker & Humblot, the publishing house behind the journal, was founded in 1798 and is one of Germany’s leading academic publishers in law, political science, economics, social sciences and history. That long institutional backing is part of the journal’s story: Die Verwaltung is not a title that depends on a single department or a short-term project grant, but a standing part of a large, stable scholarly list that also includes other public-law periodicals from the same house.

Scope and Contents

The publisher describes the journal as publishing “long and in-depth articles on the whole range of its subject matters.” Three standing elements define an ordinary volume. First, the main articles: substantial scholarly essays on administrative law and administrative science, typically doctrinal, historical or institutional in method, and written to be cited in later scholarship and in practice. Second, one issue per year is devoted to a particular topic, which gives the journal a recurring forum in which a single problem — a field of administration, a reform, a crisis — can be examined from several sides in one place. Third, at regular intervals the journal reports the jurisprudence of a particular field of administrative law, prepared by a chosen team of authors; the publisher gives police and security law and administrative procedural law as examples of fields covered in this way. Alongside these elements, the main publications in administrative law and administrative science are reviewed, so the journal also functions as a review organ through which the field keeps track of its own new literature.

For prospective authors, the practical reading of that scope is as follows. Work that fits includes: doctrinal analyses of German administrative law, including general administrative law and special fields such as planning, environmental, police, municipal, civil-service and social administration law; studies of administrative procedure and of court review of administrative action; comparative and European administrative law where the comparison illuminates the German or European system; administrative history; and administrative-science work on organisation, personnel, digitalisation and administrative reform that engages seriously with the legal framework. Work that is purely managerial, that treats administration only as a business process, or that reports a single empirical case study with no doctrinal or institutional generalisation, sits less comfortably with the journal’s stated pattern and should be discussed with the editorial office before submission if the author is in doubt.

The language rule is firm in practice: the journal is published in German, with English abstracts. Authors therefore need a manuscript of publishable quality in German, and the English abstract is the principal point of contact for international readers who find the article through indexing services.

Editorial Leadership

The publisher’s current journal page names the following editors: Martin Burgi, Michael Fehling, Klaus Ferdinand Gärditz, Patrick Hilbert, Ann-Katrin Kaufhold, Pia Lange, Matthias Ruffert and Hinnerk Wißmann, with Pia Lange serving as managing editor (geschäftsführende Herausgeberin). The editorial office is held by Professor Dr. Pia Lange, LL.M., at the Faculty of Law of the University of Bremen, and the publisher directs all manuscripts to that office. Review copy and review offers are directed separately to Professor Dr. P. Hilbert. Editorial boards of long-running journals change over time — earlier listings of this journal named a partly different group of editors — so authors should always work from the publisher’s current page rather than from an older printed issue or a secondary directory when addressing a submission.

The named editors are professors of public law at German universities, which reflects the journal’s position inside the German public-law professoriate. For an author, that has a practical consequence: the standard expected is the standard of German legal scholarship — precise use of statutory and case-law sources, engagement with the existing German-language literature, and argument that can withstand scrutiny by specialists who work daily in the same doctrinal system.

Publication Pattern and Access

The journal appears quarterly — four issues per year — with approximately 616 pages per volume. Volume numbering is annual: volume 58 corresponds to 2025 and volume 59 to 2026. Issues are available in print and online, current online issues are carried on the publisher’s eLibrary with digital object identifiers for articles, and the publisher states that the journal is fully archived and preserved via Portico. The publisher also operates an online-first route, so accepted material can appear ahead of its print issue.

Die Verwaltung is a subscription journal, not an open-access title. A search of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) application programming interface on 19 October 2026 for both ISSN 0042-4498 and ISSN 1865-5211 returned no record; that result is reported here as the outcome of that search, and readers who need a definitive statement of open-access status should rely on the publisher. The publisher’s page does carry an “Open Access for Authors” information route, which indicates that an open-access option exists within the house’s arrangements for authors, but the fee for any such option for this journal is not publicly disclosed in the sources examined for this profile, and no article-processing charge for the normal subscription route is published there either. Authors who require open access for funder compliance should therefore ask the editorial office directly, in writing, before submission, and should not assume a price from other journals of the same publisher.

Subscription Prices

The publisher’s journal page gives the following annual subscription prices, which are quoted here exactly as published there: EUR 262 for institutions (print including online, or e-only), EUR 129.90 for individuals (print including online, or e-only), and EUR 59.90 for a single print issue. A student discount of 25 per cent on the individual subscription price is allowed on presentation of a student identity card. Institutional online pricing includes access by internet-protocol address for an unlimited number of users at one site, with multi-site licences priced separately in the publisher’s journal price list; the individual price includes one single online access by username and password. The publisher notes that subscriptions are generally charged on publication of the first issue of a volume and that cancellation is requested six weeks before the end of the calendar year. Prices in a directory profile age quickly, so libraries should confirm the current figure against the publisher’s price list for the year in question before budgeting.

Indexing and Discoverability

The publisher lists the following services as covering Die Verwaltung: Anvur (the Italian national evaluation agency), BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine), CNKI Scholar, CNPIEC, Deep Green, EBSCO Discovery Service, EconBiz (ZBW), ECONIS (ZBW), ERIH PLUS, Factiva (Dow Jones), GENIOS, Google Scholar, IBZ Online and IBR Online (De Gruyter), J-Gate, NAVER Academic, OpenAlex, ProQuest databases, ResearchGate, Scopus (Elsevier), Sherpa Romeo, Summon (Ex Libris / ProQuest), VHB-JOURQUAL, VUB Paperboy, World Affairs Online and WorldCat (OCLC), with archiving in Portico. Inclusion in Scopus and in ERIH PLUS is the most consequential part of that list for authors: Scopus coverage makes the journal visible in the citation database most widely used for evaluation in Europe, and ERIH PLUS listing signals that the journal meets the European Reference Index’s criteria for humanities and social-science periodicals, including a documented external peer-review procedure. The VHB-JOURQUAL listing is additionally relevant for business and management scholars in German-speaking institutions who publish administrative-science work in the journal.

Discoverability should nevertheless be understood realistically. Because the articles are in German, the journal’s international citation footprint is smaller than that of comparable English-language titles, even though indexing is broad. The English abstracts are therefore not a formality: they are the text that international searchers read when deciding whether to obtain and cite the German full text.

Metrics and Standing

OpenAlex, resolved through the ISSN endpoint for ISSN 0042-4498 to source S4210228072 under the name Die Verwaltung, records 538 works for the journal, with coverage in that database running from 1986 to 2026, 528 citations in total, an h-index of 10, an i10-index of 12 and a two-year mean citedness of 0.058. Those OpenAlex figures describe a small, specialised, national-language law journal accurately: legal scholarship cites books, commentaries and court decisions heavily and journal articles comparatively slowly, so a low mean citedness is a property of the field’s citation culture rather than evidence of weak scholarship, and no reader should compare this number directly with journals in the natural sciences.

Secondary reporting of SCImago data tells a consistent story in a different measurement system. SciJournal, summarising SCImago and Journal Citation Reports data for this title, reports a SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) of 0.104 for 2025 (0.111 for 2024), an h-index of 3 on the SCImago basis, and a 2025 impact factor figure of 0.120. This directory’s own stored record places the journal in quartile Q4. The difference between the OpenAlex h-index of 10 and the SCImago h-index of 3 is not a contradiction to be resolved by choosing one of them: the two databases cover different document sets over different windows, and Scopus-based counts for a German-language law journal capture only part of the journal’s actual citation life, much of which takes place in German books, commentaries and judgments that neither database indexes. The honest summary is that Die Verwaltung is a long-established, Scopus-covered national specialist journal whose formal citation metrics are modest, whose reputation inside its field rests on longevity, editorship and doctrinal influence, and whose Q4 placement should be read with that field context in mind.

No acceptance rate, median review time or similar editorial statistic is published by the journal in the sources examined, so those fields are not publicly disclosed here rather than estimated. Likewise, no Journal Impact Factor is claimed in this profile beyond the secondary figure attributed above, because the authoritative Clarivate record was not examined directly.

Submitting a Manuscript

The publisher directs manuscripts to the managing editor’s office at the University of Bremen, and review material to the editor responsible for reviews; the current contact details are on the publisher’s journal page. A manuscript-formatting guide (“Hinweise für die Manuskriptgestaltung”) is published by the house as a PDF and should be followed exactly, since a quarterly journal producing some 616 pages a year cannot carry manuscripts that arrive in a house style of another publisher. The publisher maintains a peer-review statement, a publication-ethics and publication-malpractice statement, and a general statement on the use of generative artificial intelligence, all linked from the journal page; authors should read all three before submitting, because they form part of the conditions under which the journal considers work.

One condition deserves emphasis because it surprises authors used to English-language journals. The imprint states that submission of a manuscript constitutes an offer to transfer the exclusive publishing right for the duration of copyright, that the transferred right includes storage in a database and further reproduction, and that after one year the author retains the ability to grant other publishers a simple reprint permission, with any resulting fee belonging to the author. Authors who need different terms — for example because of an institutional or funder mandate — must raise the point before submission, not after acceptance. Unsolicited manuscripts are handled at the sender’s risk, and return is only possible where return postage is enclosed, a reminder that the primary route is the editorial office named by the publisher.

A realistic submission checklist for this journal is therefore: a complete, long-form manuscript in German that makes a doctrinal or institutional contribution to administrative law or administrative science; an English abstract written with the same care as the main text, since it carries the article internationally; references formatted to the publisher’s manuscript guide, with German statutory and case citations in the form German readers expect; a check that the argument engages the German-language literature, including, where relevant, earlier contributions in this journal itself; and written clarification, where needed, of open-access requirements and of the rights position described above. Guest-edited and themed material exists in the journal’s pattern — one issue a year is devoted to a particular topic — so a group of authors with a coherent theme may also approach the editorial office with a proposal rather than submitting isolated papers.

Who Should Read and Cite It

For readers, the journal’s value is depth in one legal system combined with European awareness. A researcher working on administrative procedure, on the legal control of police and security authorities, on planning and environmental administration, or on the administrative state’s response to digitalisation and crisis will find sustained treatments here that are hard to obtain in English-language sources, and the periodic jurisprudence reports make the journal useful as a monitoring tool for developments in a chosen field of administrative law. For librarians, it is a core German public-law periodical with an unbroken run since 1968, broad indexing and Portico preservation. For authors, it offers a demanding but appropriate home for German-language doctrinal work, with the visibility that Scopus and ERIH PLUS coverage provides and the limitation — which should be faced honestly — that a German-language article will be read mainly where German legal scholarship is read.

In short: Die Verwaltung (ISSN 0042-4498 print; ISSN 1865-5211 online), founded by Ernst Forsthoff in 1968, published quarterly by Duncker & Humblot in Berlin and edited by a board of German public-law professors under managing editor Pia Lange, is a subscription journal of record for German administrative law and administrative science. Its formal metrics are modest and field-typical, its indexing is broad, its prices and submission conditions are published by the house, and its standing rests on nearly six decades of continuous publication.