The latest issue of American Psychologist, 62(5), includes two fascinating tables summarizing the operations of the APA’s journals.  Most relevant to the readers of AHP are the vital statistics for History of Psychology (p. 544), below.

The upshot is that, if you submit an article to History of Psychology, you have a ~38% chance of having your piece accepted for publication.  In other words, fewer than 2 in 5 submissions are ever published. 

Summary of Journal Operations, History of Psychology, 2006

Editor: James H. Capshew
Office: Dept of History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana University
Published Quarterly, beginning in February
ISSN: 1093-4510
Website: http://www.apa.org/journals/hop/

Editorial Policy: “The journal serves as a forum for both psychologists and other interested scholars for the full range of current ideas and approaches pertaining to the relationship between history and psychology. History of Psychology primarily features scholarly articles dealing with specific issues, areas, and/or individuals in the history of psychology. It also publishes papers in related areas, such as historical psychology (the history of consciousness and behavior), theory in psychology as it pertains to history, historiography, biographical and autobiographical analysis, psychohistory, and issues involved in teaching the history of psychology.”

Manuscripts received: 28
No. accepted: 15
No. pending: 21
Average % rejected: 62%
Items published: 19
Total pages published: 349
Average lag in months: 7
Individual subscriptions: 604
Institutional subscriptions: 95

In the fine print, rejection rate is defined as follows: “The rejection rate indicates the chance of ultimate acceptance by a journal. Most manuscripts are rejected initially; then, after some number of revisions, a certain number are finally accepted. A rejection rate of, say, 77% means that manuscripts submitted to that journal have a 23% chance of ultimately being accepted.”

-JTB.