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:
SocINDEX with Full Text (Ebsco)
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 12,812 full-text downloads in 2025. The accesses – almost exclusively universities, libraries, and research institutes – came from 59 countries, with 78.3% of users coming from outside of Germany.
JSTOR
Since August 2011, the HSR and HSR Supplement have been included in JSTOR (without Moving Wall). The most relevant statistics for 2025 were the 183,132 full-text downloads, averaging 15,261 downloads per month in total. Users from 192 countries access HSR content via JSTOR.
Social Science Citation Index
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 03.02.2026, there were 1,276 citations from the Web of Science Core Collection, whereby the h-index reached 35.
| Results found | 1,372 |
| Sum of the times cited | 10,871 |
| Sum of the times cited without self-citations | 9,241 |
| Citing articles | 8,773 |
| Citing articles without self-citations | 8,332 |
| Average citations per article | 7.92 |
| H-Index | 35 |
Google Scholar
By means of Google Scholar's citations, it 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 84.
Google Scholar
| 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | |
| Papers | 1,000 | 1,000 | 1,000 | 1,000 | 1,000 | 1,000 | 1,000 | 1,000 | 1,000 | 1,000 | 1,000 | 1,000 | 1,000 |
| Citations | 4,011 | 8,559 | 10,184 | 13,129 | 14,045 | 16,657 | 19,541 | 22,770 | 27,219 | 34,090 | 38,654 | 43,122 | 45,915 |
| 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 | 976.91 |
| 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 | 45.92 |
| h-index | 24 | 38 | 37 | 42 | 43 | 48 | 50 | 57 | 59 | 69 | 75 | 79 | 84 |