About Solid Earth Sciences

Solid Earth Sciences

Overview and identity

Solid Earth Sciences is a peer-reviewed journal in the Earth sciences based in Guangzhou, Guangdong, China. It is the journal of the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which holds the copyright, and it is published by Elsevier. The journal has been active since 2016 and appears online under the online ISSN 2451-912X. Its abbreviated title is SESCI, a form that also appears in the article numbering and digital object identifiers of the papers it publishes. On ScienceDirect, Elsevier's journal platform, Solid Earth Sciences is presented as an open access title, so the research articles it publishes are made available to readers through that platform rather than sitting only in a subscription archive.

The journal's identity is deliberately broad within the solid Earth. Where many Chinese geoscience journals are organised around a single institute specialism, a single region or a single method, Solid Earth Sciences states an ambition to provide an interface for Earth scientists all over the world, to share new progress and exchange new ideas. That international framing, its English-language presentation on ScienceDirect, its Guangzhou copyright holder and its Elsevier publishing arrangement together define the title. It should not be confused with Solid Earth, a different journal published by Copernicus under a different ISSN, despite the similarity of the names.

History and development

Solid Earth Sciences began publishing in 2016. Its volume numbering follows the calendar in the straightforward way that annual volumes allow readers to check: volume 11 is the volume for 2026. A journal that reaches its eleventh volume in a decade has therefore maintained a continuous publication record since its launch, moving from its founding volumes in the second half of the 2010s into a regular quarterly rhythm. Bibliographic listings record a frequency of four issues per year, which matches the quarterly pattern of its recent ScienceDirect volumes, in which, for example, volume 11, issue 2 was in progress for June 2026 with final, fully citable articles already released into it.

The journal's first decade coincided with a period in which Chinese Earth science institutes were expanding the international reach of their publishing. A title launched in 2016 did not need to build a print subscription base in the older manner; it could be designed from the start as an online, open access journal on a major international platform, with article numbers rather than only page sequences and with digital object identifiers in the Elsevier pattern. The 2026 articles visible in its current volume, carrying numbers in the 100292 to 100313 range, show that article-number model in operation, and the presence of a corrigendum to a 2025 article in the same volume shows the ordinary scholarly apparatus of correction operating alongside new research.

Publisher, copyright holder and Guangzhou home

The copyright line of the journal reads Copyright Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, published by Elsevier B.V. That division of roles matters. The Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is the owning institution in Guangzhou, while Elsevier provides the international publishing platform, the ScienceDirect presentation, the journal homepage at elsevier.com/locate/SESCI and the production system through which articles are read and cited. Readers citing the journal should therefore record both facts: a Chinese Academy of Sciences institute journal, published internationally by Elsevier.

The Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry is one of China's leading research institutions in Earth and environmental sciences. Its predecessor was the Guangzhou branch of the Institute of Geochemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, founded in 1987, and the institute took its current name in 1994. A longer institutional history traces the parent Institute of Geochemistry back to 1964, its relocation from Beijing to Guiyang in 1966 under Academician Tu Guangchi, the move of part of its disciplines from Guiyang to Guangzhou in 1986 with support from the Guangdong provincial government, formal independence as the Guangzhou institute in the early 1990s, and further enhancement in 2002 through integration with a Changsha geotectonics institute. A journal owned by such an institute inherits a particular research culture: one formed around geochemistry, mineral deposits and the deep processes of the Earth.

Institute research setting

The institute describes its research as organised around organic geochemistry, elemental geochemistry, isotope geochemistry, environmental science and technology, and oil, gas and mineral resources. Its stated research themes include continental dynamics and lithospheric evolution, deep geological processes and system changes of the Earth, metallogenic regulation and the dynamics of petroleum accumulation, marine geology and marginal sea evolution, and environmental pollution and control. It is home to laboratories at national, Chinese Academy of Sciences and provincial levels, including the State Key Laboratory of Organic Geochemistry and the State Key Laboratory of Isotope Geochemistry, together with key laboratories for ocean and marginal sea geology, mineralogy and metallogeny, environmental protection and resources utilisation, and mineral physics and materials.

That laboratory structure explains much of the journal's character. Solid Earth Sciences is not a house newsletter for one laboratory; it is an outward-facing journal from an institute whose internal divisions span isotope analysis, mineralogy, metallogeny and deep-Earth processes. Since 2000 the institute reports publishing more than 8,000 papers, including more than 20 in Nature, Science and PNAS. A journal launched from that base in 2016 could draw on an established community of authors and reviewers in geochemistry and allied fields while inviting contributions from Earth scientists worldwide, exactly as its stated aim describes.

Aims and scope

The journal's published aims and scope list seven areas. First, chemical geodynamics, covering the physical and chemical evolution of the Earth. Second, petrologic processes, ranging from igneous rocks to sedimentary and metamorphic rocks. Third, present and past environments. Fourth, tectonic processes that affect the crust and upper mantle, ranging from structural geology to plate tectonics. Fifth, the geochemical behaviour of different elements and mineralisation processes. Sixth, high pressure experiments that address the chemical and physical properties of Earth materials. Seventh, new methods, new ideas and new models. Taken together, the list is a compact map of modern solid Earth research: how the planet's interior works chemically and physically, how rocks record that working, how the crust and upper mantle move, how ore-forming elements behave, and how experiments and models test the interpretations drawn from field and laboratory evidence.

The directory description of the journal summarises the same territory as geochemistry, geophysics, petrology and solid-earth processes. Those four labels are worth keeping together. A purely geochemical journal might exclude tectonic modelling; a purely geophysical journal might exclude mineralisation chemistry. Solid Earth Sciences explicitly spans both, and its scope items on environments past and present and on high-pressure experiment connect laboratory and field evidence to the history of the planet rather than only to its present state.

Editorial leadership

The editor-in-chief is Professor Weidong Sun, listed on the editorial board page with the Institute of Oceanology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The editors named on the same board include Professor William L. Griffin and Professor Yigang Xu of the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry. Its associate editors include researchers based at the Guangzhou institute, among them Huayong Chen, Hong-Ping He, Qiang Wang of the State Key Laboratory of Isotope Geochemistry, Gang-Jian Wei, Christina Yan Wang and Zhao-Feng Zhang, alongside colleagues from the Institute of Geochemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences such as Jing Sun. The board therefore combines the owning institute's own senior scientists with editorial figures from elsewhere, a pattern consistent with a journal that is institutionally Guangzhou-based but internationally addressed.

Weidong Sun's own research record, as summarised in researcher profiles, spans geochemistry and petrology, geophysics and related Earth science topics, with publications in venues including Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, Ore Geology Reviews, Chemical Geology, Lithos and Solid Earth Sciences itself, and with work on subjects such as the big mantle wedge and gold deposits and on potassium isotope behaviour in subducted oceanic crust. An editor-in-chief whose own work crosses mantle geochemistry, subduction and mineralisation is a close match for the seven-part scope the journal publishes.

Research visible in the journal

Analyses of the journal's published output identify geochemistry as its largest research concern, with recurring work on zircon, mineralisation, subduction, geochronology, sedimentary rock, partial melting, pyrite and continental crust. Those topics are not a substitute for the journal's own scope statement, but they show the scope being used: zircon and geochronology papers date and trace crustal materials, mineralisation papers address how ore deposits form, and subduction papers examine one of the central tectonic processes named in the aims. The most recent volume continues the pattern in an international direction, with, for example, a 2026 research article on the control of mechanical stratification on stress localisation in a shallow magma plumbing system, a geochemical study of the palaeoenvironmental and tectonic evolution of the Salt Range Formation in the western Himalayas of Pakistan, and a study of groundwater recharge zones in the Black Volta Basin in a semi-arid region. A Guangzhou-owned journal publishing Himalayan tectonics, magma-system modelling and West African groundwater research in a single volume year illustrates the worldwide interface its aims describe.

Indexing, metrics and bibliographic record

For citation and library purposes the essential record is simple: title Solid Earth Sciences, online ISSN 2451-912X, copyright holder the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, publisher Elsevier, active from 2016, four issues per year. Journal metric listings computed from Scopus and SCImago data record an H-index of 19 for the title. Such metrics are snapshots rather than permanent properties, and readers should treat the H-index as a record of the journal's accumulated citation presence at the time the listing was compiled, not as a quality guarantee for any individual article. The stable facts for identifying the journal remain its title, ISSN, publisher and owning institute, and those are the details that distinguish it in catalogues from similarly named Earth science titles.

Readership and how to use the journal

The natural readership of Solid Earth Sciences is researchers and advanced students in geochemistry, petrology, tectonics, mineral deposits, high-pressure experimental Earth science and related modelling work. For a reader approaching the journal for the first time, the seven scope items are the most efficient guide: a paper on the geochemical behaviour of an element in a subduction setting, a petrologic study of igneous, sedimentary or metamorphic rocks, or an experimental study of Earth materials at high pressure all sit squarely inside the journal's stated territory. Because the journal is open access on ScienceDirect, its articles can be read and checked directly at the point of citation, which suits a directory profile as well as a researcher: the claims made for the journal here, from its copyright line to its editor-in-chief and its current volume, can each be verified on its own journal pages.

Place in Chinese Earth science publishing

Solid Earth Sciences occupies a distinctive place among the geoscience journals in this directory. It is younger than the long-running Chinese-language academy journals founded in the 1950s, and it was created in the form those older titles later had to adapt towards: English-language, online, internationally published and open access. At the same time it is not a free-floating commercial title; it is anchored in Guangzhou in one of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' principal geochemistry institutes, whose laboratories in isotope and organic geochemistry, mineralogy and metallogeny give the journal its disciplinary centre of gravity. That combination, a 2016 launch, a Guangzhou institute owner, an Elsevier platform, a quarterly schedule reaching volume 11 in 2026 and a scope running from chemical geodynamics to mineralisation and high-pressure experiment, is the verified profile of Solid Earth Sciences.