Editorial

The Scandinavian Economic History Review is published by Taylor & Francis under the auspices of the Scandinavian Society for Economic and Social History. As a shared responsibility, the Editor-in-Chief assignment rotates across the four Scandinavian countries according to four-year terms. The turn to host the journal has now come to Sweden. It is a great honour to be given the responsibility for this reputable journal, published since 1953, during the coming four years. On behalf of the Society, we would like to begin this brief editorial by expressing our gratitude to our predecessors from Norway, Espen Ekberg (BI Oslo) and Francisco J. Beltran Tapia (NTNU), for their outstanding work over the last four years. Among their achievements, they have successfully sustained the effort to increase the quality of the published works, launched several special issues, and initiated the Heckscher Price, which is given to the author(s) of the best article each year.

The design of the editorial team has varied somewhat across the years. We, the editors-in-chief, are flanked by three additional editors, one from each of the other three Scandinavian countries. This means that Klara Arnberg (Stockholm University), previously the journal’s Swedish editor, has been replaced by Kristin Ranestad (University of Oslo) from Norway. We would like to thank Klara Arnberg for her excellent work during the previous term. We are lucky to still count on Laura Ekholm (University of Helsinki) as Finnish editor and Paul Sharp (University of Southern Denmark) as Danish editor. To complete the editorial team, we have also recruited a new editorial secretary, John Lapidus (University of Gothenburg), and a book review editor, Erik Bengtsson (Lund University).

Under our editorship, the journal will continue publishing high-quality articles in the fields of economic, business, and social history with a particular focus on the Nordic countries and the Baltic region. We also encourage submissions with a focus on other countries, provided that they contain a comparative element that includes Scandinavia or the Baltic region, as well as submissions which engage with theoretical and methodological issues. As in previous terms, the journal will continue publishing reviews of books with a focus on Scandinavia and the Baltic countries.

We are happy to announce that Taylor & Francis now offers several journal metrics on its website, the most well-known of which is the so-called Impact Factor. For 2022, the Impact Factor was 0.6 and the so-called 5-Year Impact Factor was 0.8. These metrics make it easier to rate the impact of the journal’s publications and, hopefully, attract authors who aim to publish high-quality papers. We also plan to continue the tradition of offering special issues. Our intention is to publish one special issue per year. We are now pleased to present the call for papers for the first of the upcoming special issues: Politics back in business? State-owned enterprises in recent history with Pasi Nevalainen (University of Jyväskylä) and Ola Innset (Norwegian Business School) as guest editors. The call for papers has been published on EH.net and on the journal’s web page.

We are looking forward to reading many new and exciting papers in the coming years, and we hope to meet the authors’ expectations on quick turnaround and valuable insights and advice from referees and from the editorial team. In this process, we will continue to depend on the expert knowledge and time-consuming efforts of the journal’s pool of referees. It warrants repeating that the willingness of referees to write high-quality reports is an integral part of scientific publication. It is our hope that the previous fruitful collaboration between referees and the journal’s editorial team will continue in the coming years.