The journal was one of the first online, peer-reviewed academic journals, published originally as an online archive of scholarly papers accessed using the Gopher (protocol).[citation needed]
The journal describes its purpose as being:
to produce a high quality publication of world-systems research articles; to publish quantitative and comparative research on world-systems; to publish works of theory construction and codification of causal propositions; to publish data sets in connection with articles; to publish reviews of books relevant to world-systems studies; and to encourage authors to use the hypermedia advantages of electronic publication to present their research results.[3]
