Historical Social Research

Journal Impact

The journal impact has become a significant criteria to define the value of of an academic journal. For example, in 2011, the European Science Foundation has admitted the HSR to the category of “international top-journal (INT1 Sub-Category).”

A selection of other important indicators you can find here:

Since 2006, HSR has been included in Ebsco's SocINDEX with Full Text collection. All HSR issues from volume 28 (2003) onwards are available there in full text for licensees. The online edition is published at the same time as the print edition, which has contributed significantly to the worldwide reception of HSR articles in recent years.

There were a total of 13,215 full-text downloads in 2024. The accesses – almost exclusively universities, libraries, and research institutes – came from 60 countries, with 92.5% of users coming from outside of Germany.

Since August 2011, the HSR and HSR Supplement have been included in JSTOR (without Moving Wall). The most relevant statistics for 2024 were the 207,141 full-text downloads, averaging 17,262 downloads per month in total. Users from 190 countries access HSR content via JSTOR.

Since 2006, the HSR has been represented in the Social Science Citation Index from Thompson Scientific / Clarivate. The development of citations in the SSCI is positive – the 100-mark was reached in 2011; as of 27.01.2025, there were 1076 citations from the Web of Science Core Collection, whereby the h-index reached 32.

Metrics 2006-2024 (27 January 2025)
Results found 1317
Sum of the times cited 9421

Sum of the times cited without self-citations

7941
Citing articles 7542
Citing articles without self-citations 7142
Average citations per article 7.15
H-Index 32

By means of Google Scholar's citationsit is possible to discern a journal’s impact through the cumulated citations of all HSR articles over longue durée (the maximum number of papers included is 1000). Over a longer period of time, the HSR has an h-index of 79.

Google Scholar

  2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022
Papers 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000 1000
Citations 4011 8559 10184 13129 14045 16657 19541 22770 27219 34090 38654 43122
Cites/year 117.97 244.54 212.17 345.50 280.90 416.43 476.61 517.50 633.00 774.77 858.98 937.43
Cites/paper 4.01 8.56 10.18 13.14 14.07 16.66 19.54 22.79 27.22 34.16 38.69 43.12
h-index 24 38 37 42 43 48 50 57 59 69 75 79

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