Dear HES-List Colleagues, those of you who are (rightly) concerned over the decision of the SSCI of dropping HOPE from the indexed journals, may be interested in the following letter, which was sent to the SSCI people from the Executive Committee of the European Society of the History of Economic Thought. I know that the editors of EJHET are sending a similar letter. Let us hope that our joint efforts will be successful Annalisa Rosselli ****************************************************************** Mr. Ryan Joyce Editor, Social Sciences/Arts & Humanities Editorial Development, Thomson ISI 3501 Market Street Philadelphia, PA 19104 July 29, 2005 Dear Mr. Joyce, we have heard from our colleagues at the History of Economics Society that the History of Political Economy (HOPE) journal is being dropped from the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI). As officers of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought we cannot but share their concern over this decision, and not only because historians of economic thought would lose a useful tool of research. As you are certainly aware, in Europe and elsewhere an increasing number of government agencies which allocate funds to research departments and individual scholars are making use of quantitative indicators of scientific productivity including number of citations, which is perhaps the most widely applied. Although many objections are being raised against these criteria, they are accepted by the majority of scholars as long as they are perceived to be fair and representative of the actual output of scientific work. This would not be the case for the activity of the over 250 present members of our society, who publish in journals specialised in the history of economic thought. HOPE is the oldest of them, and has always been regarded as one of the leading journals in our sub-field, together with the European Journal for the History of Economic Thought (EJHET), which is particularly important for us in Europe, and the Journal of the History of Economic Thought (JHET). We believe that a clear picture of what is going on in our sub-field cannot be obtained unless due account is taken of at least all three of these journals. Thus, far from endorsing your decision to drop HOPE, we strongly urge you to consider including the other two above-mentioned journals among those that you currently index. We are confident that you will reconsider your decision in the light of these points. The Executive Committee of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought Richard Arena, President, CNRS-LATAPSES, France Annalisa Rosselli, Vice-President, Universit� di Roma Tor Vergata, Italy Pierluigi Porta, Secretary, Universit� di Milano Bicocca, Italy Pascal Bridel, Treasurer, Universit� de Lausanne, Switzerland Antonio Manuel Martins Almodovar, University of Porto, Portugal Daniel Diatkine, University of Evry, France Antoin Murphy, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland Yiorgos Stathakis, University of Crete, Greece John Vint , Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK