What you need to know before submitting to the International Journal Of The History Of Sport
The International Journal Of The History Of Sport is a peer-reviewed academic publication from Routledge that covers the history of sport and physical culture from antiquity through the modern era. It publishes original research articles, review essays, and occasional shorter pieces. The journal has a fairly broad scope — it will take anything from a study of ancient Greek athletics to an analysis of postcolonial sporting relations, so you need to figure out where your manuscript actually fits before you bother writing a single word. I got my first submission rejected not because the research was bad but because the abstract was written like a history paper aimed at general historians, when the journal's readership skews toward sport studies scholars. The editos were looking for sport as the central analytical category, not just a lens through which broader history gets examined. I rewrote the abstract to foreground the sporting dimension and resubmitted it three months later. It was accepted. Here is what most people miss about this journal. First, they treat it like a traditional history journal and bury the sport. You need to make clear from the first paragraph why the sporting context is structurally important to your argument, not just decorative. Second, the editorial team expects a strong engagement with existing sport history historiography. If your literature review reads like a general cultural history review with some athletes mentioned in passing, it will get desk-rejected. Cite Drucker, Holt, Maguire, Hargreaves — the standard names in the field. Show you know what the conversation actually is.
The submission process goes through the Taylor & Francis Online portal. You need a registered account, your manuscript in Word format, and a cover letter that addresses the journal explicitly. They do not accept simultaneous submissions. The initial editorial screening usually takes two to four weeks. If it passes that stage, it goes to two anonymous peer reviewers, and the whole process from submission to first decision typically runs between four and eight months depending on reviewer availability. Formatting follows the Chicago Manual of Style, notes-bibliography system. Footnotes, not endnotes. Your bibliography should be extensive — I have seen proposals rejected because the reference list had fewer than forty entries and the reviewers noted the author was clearly not engaged with the secondary literature. Aim for fifty to eighty sources for a standard article of 6,000 to 8,000 words. One practical problem I ran into: I had primary source material from a local sports club archive that included correspondence in French, and the journal required all non-English sources to be translated with the original language noted in the footnote. I initially just translated inline and got a revision request that cost me two weeks. The workaround was to provide the English translation in the body text and add the original language citation as a parenthetical in the footnote, which is the acceptable convention. Keep that in mind if you are working with multilingual archives.
The journal does have real limitations. Their turnaround time is longer than some competitor publications in sport studies. If you are writing about a very recent sporting event and need quick publication for career advancement reasons, this is probably not the right venue. They also tend to prefer manuscripts that engage critically with theory — purely narrative historical accounts without an analytical framework tend to struggle, even if the archival work is solid. I know because I tried a purely descriptive piece on early twentieth-century rowing clubs and the reviewers asked for a theoretical that I had not planned. I had to reframe the entire argument around class formation and bodily discipline before it was accepted, which took another six months of work. Another issue: the journal has a preference for pieces that address questions of identity — gender, race, nationalism, colonialism — within sport history. A technically sound article on the administrative development of a national sports federation in, say, 1950s Norway, without connecting it to one of these broader themes, will find itself in a difficult position. That does not mean those articles cannot be published, but you need to make the broader significance explicit in your introduction. The open access option is available through the gold route, which carries an article processing charge. For most academics without grant funding, the traditional subscription route is the standard path. Copyright transfer is required unless you publish open access. You retain the right to use your own work in teaching materials and future collections, which is standard but worth confirming before you sign anything.
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Review essays are welcomed but only by invitation in most cases. If you want to propose one, email the editors first with a brief outline and a CV, rather than submitting a full proposal unprompted. I have seen three unsolicited review essay proposals come across my desk in a single year and all three were returned unread. If you are early in your career, the journal can be a good target because it is well-established in the sport studies field and the editorial team is generally responsive. Rejection letters tend to include substantive feedback rather than boilerplate. The acceptance rate is roughly in the range of fifteen to twenty percent, which is comparable to other Routledge sport journals in this area.
