About Journal of Agro-Environment Science

Journal of Agro-Environment Science

Overview and identity

Journal of Agro-Environment Science is a Chinese national journal of agricultural environmental science, based in Tianjin, China, and identified by ISSN 1672-2043. It is jointly sponsored by the Agro-Environmental Protection Institute of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, in Tianjin, and the Chinese Society of Agro-Ecological Environment Protection, and it is published monthly. The journal publishes original research on agroecology, environmental protection and agricultural product safety, with a keen focus on how agricultural production impacts the environment.

The journal's abbreviated form is J. Agro-Environ. Sci. Its publisher of record in international databases is the Editorial Board of Journal of Agro-Environment Science. Among China's agricultural journals, this title occupies the environmental-protection niche at national level: where the agricultural university journals are comprehensive and institution-based, this is a specialist national journal edited from the ministry's own agro-environmental research institute.

Sponsorship: a ministry institute and a national society

The journal's two sponsors define its mission precisely. The Agro-Environmental Protection Institute of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs, based in Tianjin, is the national research institute charged with the environmental side of Chinese agriculture: farmland environmental quality, agricultural waste and wastewater, rural environmental management and the monitoring systems that track them. A journal edited from that institute is the publishing arm of the national agro-environmental protection research system.

The Chinese Society of Agro-Ecological Environment Protection, the co-sponsor, is the learned society of the same professional community. Institute-plus-society sponsorship is a classic Chinese arrangement for a national specialist journal: the institute supplies the editorial home, staff and research base; the society supplies the national professional network of authors, referees and readers. The result is a journal whose contents track the priorities of China's agricultural environmental policy unusually closely, because its sponsors help to formulate that policy's scientific basis.

Scope and subject coverage

The journal's stated scope, as summarised by indexing services, is original research pertinent to agroecology and environmental protection as well as agricultural product safety, with a focus on how agricultural production impacts the environment. Its Scopus subject classification spreads across agronomy and crop science, ecology, nature and landscape conservation, ecology, evolution, behavior and systematics, environmental chemistry, management, monitoring, policy and law, and soil science — a classification that faithfully describes a journal working the whole interface between farming and environment.

Substantively, recurring territory includes: farmland soil pollution and remediation, including heavy metals in agricultural soils; agricultural non-point source pollution of water; pesticide and fertiliser environmental behaviour; agricultural waste treatment and resource recovery; rural domestic wastewater and waste management; agroecosystem ecology and farmland biodiversity; climate change and agriculture; environmental monitoring methods and standards for agricultural areas; and the quality and safety of agricultural products as an environmental question — contaminants entering food from soil, water and inputs.

Publication pattern and scale

The journal is published twelve times a year — monthly — a frequency confirmed by indexing services. SCImago-derived listings record 174 documents for the journal in 2025 and 246 documents in 2021, with a three-year document count above 900 in the 2021 ranking window: this is one of the larger Chinese agricultural journals by article volume, as befits a national specialist title serving a big research community. One ranking records 39.23 references per document for 2021, the reference density of a fully developed research literature.

Monthly publication at that volume requires a substantial editorial operation at the Tianjin institute, and it gives the journal a responsiveness that quarterly titles cannot match: monitoring results, pollution assessments and remediation studies reach the professional community within months of acceptance, which matters in a field where findings feed directly into standards, inspections and remediation programmes.

Indexing, evaluation and standing

The journal is indexed in Scopus, with coverage in current directory windows running from 2018 into the mid-2020s and ranking records reaching back further: the agricultural engineering source-journal rankings derived from the 2016 Chinese S&T Journal Citation Reports placed the Journal of Agro-Environment Science second in its field listing with 5,305 citations recorded — evidence of substantial domestic citation weight in the agricultural engineering and environment-resource field. SCImago records an SJR of 0.218 and an h-index of 24, with category placements in the third and fourth quartiles.

A related title from the same editorial stable, the Journal of Agricultural Resources and Environment, is published by the same Editorial Board of Journal of Agro-Environment Science and carries its own stronger ranking profile (SJR 0.290, Q2 in one listing, 157 documents in 2025). The two journals are distinct titles sharing an editorial board's office; citations must not be merged between them, and the relationship is best recorded exactly as the databases record it.

The field the journal serves

Agricultural environmental science rose to national importance in China as the costs of intensive farming became measurable: soil heavy-metal surveys, water eutrophication from fertiliser runoff, livestock waste from concentrated production, and plastic film residues all became objects of national policy, and each required a monitoring and remediation science. The Agro-Environmental Protection Institute and its journal stand at the centre of that science. The journal's scope phrase — agricultural product safety — marks the point where environmental science meets food safety, the junction at which soil and water quality become public-health questions.

China's more recent policy frame — agricultural green development, fertiliser and pesticide reduction, rural living-environment improvement, and the carbon agenda in agriculture — has widened the journal's territory further. A journal founded for agro-environmental protection finds, in the 2020s, that its founding subject has become one of the central organising concerns of agricultural policy as a whole.

History and development

The journal's ISSN sequence and its documented citation presence in the 2016 core-journal rankings place it among the established national titles of its field, and its AGRIS- and Scopus-visible article record runs continuously through the 2010s and 2020s. Its development mirrors its field's: from an early emphasis on pollution description and monitoring toward remediation engineering, standards-setting research, and the systems questions of green agricultural transition.

The editorial board's launch and operation of the sister Journal of Agricultural Resources and Environment — recorded in international listings with the same publisher of record — shows the Tianjin editorial operation expanding its portfolio as the resource-and-environment research community grew, rather than allowing a single title to swell without limit. Portfolio growth of this kind is the standard maturation path of a successful Chinese editorial office.

Readership and use

The journal describes its own professional audience accurately through its indexing summaries: university researchers, industry professionals, government officials and consultants working in agricultural and environmental science. That four-part readership — academy, industry, government, consultancy — is distinctive. Most journals in this batch address researchers first; this title's sponsors and subject place it equally in the hands of the officials who commission monitoring and the consultants who perform remediation.

For international users, the journal is a primary Chinese-language source on the environmental condition of Chinese agriculture — soil contamination, non-point pollution, waste systems — a subject on which policy-relevant data are published predominantly in Chinese national journals of exactly this type. Its Scopus presence and bilingual article presentation make its contents discoverable; cite it by exact title and ISSN 1672-2043.

Continuing role

As long as China's agricultural modernisation is judged partly by its environmental performance, the science this journal publishes remains policy-central. Sponsored by the ministry's Agro-Environmental Protection Institute in Tianjin and the Chinese Society of Agro-Ecological Environment Protection, published monthly under ISSN 1672-2043, and carrying one of the largest article volumes in Chinese agricultural publishing, the Journal of Agro-Environment Science continues as the national specialist journal of the agriculture–environment interface.