War in History

• 1. Introduction

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  War in History is a peer-reviewed academic journal that has been reshaping how scholars think about armed conflict since 1994. At first glance, a journal about war might seem to occupy a narrow corner of the humanities. But War in History was founded on a different idea entirely. Its editors took the position that military history should be woven into the broader fabric of history as a whole. That premise raises an immediate question: what does it actually look like when war stops being a separate discipline and starts being treated as one thread in a larger human story? The journal's scope, its editors, its place in citation databases, and its measured standing among its peers all point toward an answer.

• 2. A Broader Definition

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  Simon Ball at the University of Leeds, Mary Kathryn Barbier at Mississippi State University, and Phillips O'Brien at the University of Glasgow share editorial responsibility for the journal today. Together they uphold a founding conviction: that war touches economics, society, politics, and military affairs simultaneously, and that any account confined to one of those dimensions misses the whole picture. War in History publishes articles across all of those dimensions, with no set restriction regarding historical period. That openness invites work ranging from ancient naval battles to twentieth-century air campaigns. The journal explicitly includes the study of naval forces, maritime power, and air forces alongside the more familiar focus on armies and land campaigns. That breadth is not incidental; it follows directly from the editorial position that conflict is too large a subject to be cordoned off into a single sub-field.

  The late Dennis Showalter of Colorado College was among the journal's former editors, and his name stands in the record as one of those who helped establish the publication's character in its earlier years.

• 3. Standing Among Peers

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  War in History is abstracted and indexed in SCOPUS and the Social Sciences Citation Index, among other databases. Those inclusions matter practically: they determine which researchers encounter the journal when running literature searches. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the journal's 2013 impact factor was 0.237. That figure placed it 33rd out of 72 journals in the History category and 70th out of 82 titles in the International Relations category. Neither ranking sits at the top of its respective list, but both positions confirm that War in History occupies a recognized place within two distinct scholarly communities. Being indexed under International Relations as well as History reflects the journal's cross-disciplinary reach, a direct consequence of its refusal to treat military affairs as a self-contained domain. The journal appears four times a year, published by SAGE Publications on a quarterly schedule.