About the Journal

Focus and Scope

The Journal of World-Historical Information (JWHI, http://jwhi.pitt.edu) is a peer-reviewed, semi-annual, electronic journal dedicated to the interdisciplinary project of creating and maintaining a comprehensive world-historical data resource. The journal operates under the guidance of the Collaborative for Historical Information and Analysis (CHIA, http://chia.pitt.edu), the collaborative network which is creating the data resource. The data resource addresses several centuries in time with data aggregated up to the global level. The journal focuses on the particular problems of historical data—their heterogeneity, the high cost of collecting, digitizing, and documenting such data and, on the other hand, the high value of historical data for temporal analysis of the past and projection into the future. The Journal publishes five principal types of articles: editorial essays, articles on published or immediately forthcoming datasets, methodological essays, analytical articles articles, and reviews of published datasets.
While other journal address separately the issues of information science, techniques of geographic and temporal analysis, and methods in historical studies, JWHI is distinct in focusing attention on the interplay of these aspects of creating, curating, and analyzing world-historical data.  JWHI gives particular attention not only to the collection and housing of existing data but to the transformation of data to generate comprehensive and comparable data for the world and its subunits over the past several centuries.
  • The articles on  datasets may include discussion of the creation of the dataset,  the nature of historical documents included, and historical methods and analysis applicable to the dataset, and the implications of the dataset for information science.
  • Articles on methods may include the architecture of historical archives or methods for data collection, cleaning, integration, documentation, analysis, and visualization. Methodological articles are to be general statements rather than focusing on a single dataset.
  • Articles on analysis
  • Reviews of datasets provide

Peer Review Process

The journal follows a single-blind review policy. All submitted papers will be rigorously reviewed; all accepted papers will be made available in external indexing services.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides immediate open access to its content. Our publisher, the University Library System at the University of Pittsburgh, abides by the Budapest Open Access Initiative definition of Open Access:

 

“By “open access” to [peer-reviewed research literature], we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.”

Researchers engage in discovery for the public good, yet because of cost barriers or use restrictions imposed by other publishers, research results are not available to the full community of potential users. It is our mission to support a greater global exchange of knowledge by making the research published in this journal open to the public and reusable under the terms of a Creative Commons CC-BY license.

Furthermore, we encourage authors to post their pre-publication manuscript in institutional repositories or on their Web sites prior to and during the submission process, and to post the Publisher’s final formatted PDF version after publication. These practices benefit authors with productive exchanges as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.

 

There are no article processing charges, submissions fees, or any other costs required of authors to submit articles to this journal.

Journal History

The Journal of World-Historical Information (JWHI) is a peer-reviewed, electronic journal dedicated to the interdisciplinary project of creating and maintaining a comprehensive world-historical data resource. It publishes articles, reviews of datasets, and reports on the research activities associated with the Collaboritve for Historical Information and Analysis (CHIA).  

JWHI appeared with Volume 1, No. 1 in June 2013.  Volume 2-3 (2014-2015) No. 1 was published in August of 2015.  

Patrick Manning (University of Pittsburgh) serves as the Editor in Chief.    

Ruth Mostern (University of California – Merced), and Vladimir Zadorozhny (University of Pittsburgh) are founding members of the Editorial Board and Tonia Sutherland (University of Alabama) joined in 2015.   

David Ruvolo serves as Managing Editor of the journal and Ahmet Izmirlioglu is Dataset Review Editor.

JWHI will publish twice yearly with the next issue planned for December of 2015.