I was wondering the other day about good places to publish essays in American history. I think this thought was sparked by the new"Directory of History Journals" on the AHA's web site. I like how this online directory is available freely, how the AHA staff is looking for feedback to improve it, and how nicely it allows users to match their research interests with the right kind of history journal. Then I started wondering about the flipside, about the kinds of privileging and gatekeeping that can happen in U.S. history journals. So I decide to run a quick test. I went to Web of Science, the database that contains the Social Sciences Citation Index and the Arts & Humanities Citation Index. There I ran some searches to see if I could figure out what gets cited in the Journal of American History (JAH). I thought this might tell me what kinds of journals are read by JAH subscribers and editors, as well as some indication of which journals they considered most significant. The patterns that emerged caught my attention.

You can read the rest of this post at PhDinHistory. I was not able to transfer the tables to this blog.