About Journal of Geophysical Prospecting

Journal of Geophysical Prospecting

Overview and identity

The Journal of Geophysical Prospecting is an English-language, peer-reviewed, fully open access journal headquartered in Zhuozhou, Hebei, China, published by KeAi Communications with Elsevier publishing services and owned by BGP Inc., CNPC. BGP retains copyright of the overall compiled journal and the compiled issues, while authors retain copyright in their individual articles alongside scholarly usage rights, and KeAi Communications is granted non-exclusive publishing and distribution rights. The journal serves geophysical scientists worldwide engaged in underground resource prospecting, such as energy resources and mineral resources, and publishes innovative achievements across all aspects of geophysical exploration, including field data acquisition, processing and imaging, interpretation and comprehensive applications. As a platform for disseminating cutting-edge geophysical technologies and equipment advancements, it actively promotes novel techniques, practical experiences and scientific progress in exploration geophysics, and, committed to balancing theoretical advancement with practical accessibility, it strives to establish an international knowledge-exchange platform for geophysical professionals. The journal is published bimonthly, six issues per year. Its editorial office address is P.O. Box 11, Zhuozhou, Hebei 072751, China, and its editorial contact is Dr. Yang Yang.

A necessary distinction: not the Wiley journal

This Chinese journal must be distinguished from the long-established journal titled simply Geophysical Prospecting, published by Wiley, which has appeared since 1953 with print ISSN 0016-8025 and electronic ISSN 1365-2478. That Wiley title is a separate outlet with its own history and metrics, and it is not the journal described here. The Journal of Geophysical Prospecting in WorldNM's directory is the KeAi-published, BGP-owned, open access journal based in Zhuozhou, with its own editorial board, its own bimonthly schedule and its own article publishing charge arrangements. The distinction matters practically: an author intending to submit to the BGP journal who lands on the Wiley journal's pages, or the reverse, would face the wrong publisher, the wrong review system and the wrong charges. WorldNM records the two as distinct outlets and identifies this one by its owner, BGP Inc., CNPC, and by its KeAi journal page.

The owner: BGP, from 1951 to a global contractor

BGP has been actively engaged in seismic activities since 1951 in China, and it opened its international operations in the 1990s. In 2002 BGP was formally established as a liability-limited company after its merger with six other geophysical divisions operating within different parts of China. Its headquarters is in Zhuozhou City, Hebei Province, which is why the journal's editorial office is in Zhuozhou rather than in Beijing, where its publisher KeAi is based. BGP describes itself as a worldwide leading geophysical solution provider offering a comprehensive range of leading-edge geophysical products and quality services to the energy industry. It has an operating footprint covering over 80 countries and regions and a customer base in excess of 300 oil and gas companies. A journal owned by an operating contractor of that scale is not a purely academic venture: its owner acquires, processes and interprets geophysical data commercially on every continent, and the practical experience the journal says it wants to publish is generated daily inside its owner's own crews and processing centres.

BGP's operations and fleet in numbers

The scale of the owner's operations is recorded in its own figures. BGP operates and maintains a chain of coherent geophysical business activities encompassing onshore, transition-zone and offshore seismic data acquisition, seismic data processing, seismic data interpretation and reservoir geophysics, geophysical research and development, optical fibre intelligence reservoir geophysics, non-seismic survey, geophysical software systems, equipment manufacturing, multi-client business and a new energy business. It currently owns and operates a fleet of 152 land seismic crews, 10 ocean-bottom cable and ocean-bottom node crews, 4 streamer vessels, 11 vertical seismic profiling crews and 21 non-seismic crews, as well as 30 seismic data processing and interpretation centres distributed in China and overseas. Those numbers explain the journal's editorial balance between theory and practice: with more than 180 field crews and 30 processing centres, the owner's organisation encounters acquisition, processing and interpretation problems at a volume few universities can match, and the journal exists in part to convert that operational knowledge, together with academic research, into published, citable progress for the wider profession.

Aims: the full exploration workflow

The journal's aims and scope cover cutting-edge theories, innovative methods, advanced technologies and practical case studies in geophysical exploration. Its workflow framing runs from field data acquisition, through processing and imaging, to interpretation and comprehensive application, mirroring the sequence by which a geophysical survey becomes a drilling or development decision. That end-to-end coverage is significant because exploration geophysics fails at its interfaces: an acquisition design that processing cannot handle, or an imaging result that interpreters cannot use geologically, wastes the whole survey. A single journal that accepts acquisition, processing, imaging and interpretation papers, and judges them partly on their usefulness to the other stages, encourages authors to write for the whole chain rather than for one specialist silo. The journal states this intent directly in its commitment to balance theoretical advancement with practical accessibility, language that tells field practitioners their case studies belong beside academic method papers.

Sections of the journal

The journal organises its content into named sections that map the modern exploration toolkit. They are Intelligent Geophysical Technique, Acquisition Technique, Processing Technique, Seismic Simulation, Rock Physics, Migration Imaging, Comprehensive Research, Microseism, Development Seismic, Seismogeology, Non-seismic methods, Logging Methods, Geothermal Exploration, and Carbon Sequestration and Monitoring Technologies. Several choices in that list mark the journal's contemporary position. An intelligent techniques section gives machine learning and automation a permanent home rather than special-issue status. Development seismic and microseism sections extend the journal beyond exploration into the producing life of a field, where time-lapse surveys and microseismic monitoring guide extraction. Geothermal exploration and carbon sequestration and monitoring sections extend it beyond hydrocarbons altogether, into the energy-transition applications, finding geothermal reservoirs and verifying stored carbon dioxide underground, for which the same acquisition, imaging and monitoring skills are indispensable and for which BGP itself maintains a new energy business line.

Peer review and author framework

The journal follows a double anonymized review process, in which authors and reviewers are anonymised to each other. A submission is initially assessed by the editors for suitability; suitable manuscripts are typically sent to a minimum of two reviewers for independent expert assessment of scientific quality, and the editors' decision is final. Editors take no part in decisions on papers they have written, papers by family members or colleagues, or papers relating to products or services in which they have an interest, and such submissions are handled independently of the editor involved. The published workflow runs from editorial office screening, with desk rejection for out-of-scope, ethically conflicted, highly similar, unoriginal or methodologically flawed work, through reviewer invitation by the Editor-in-Chief or a delegated board member, feedback after at least two reviews, and a final collaborative decision on revision, with conflicted submissions, including special-issue submissions involving a guest editor, reassigned to an unconflicted editor. Submissions are automatically screened using iThenticate CrossCheck for plagiarism and overlapping text, all authors must meet the standard contribution, drafting and approval criteria and remain accountable for the whole work, competing interests and funding must be declared, and authors are encouraged to provide ORCID identifiers.

Open access, charges and schedule

The journal is a peer-reviewed, fully open access journal owned by BGP Inc., CNPC. Every article is universally and freely accessible via the internet in perpetuity, in an easily readable format immediately after publication, and free for everyone to read, download, copy and distribute. Articles are published under the author's choice of Creative Commons licence: CC BY, allowing copying, extracts, new works, alteration and commercial use with appropriate credit, a link to the formal publication through its DOI and an indication of changes, or CC BY-NC-ND, allowing non-commercial copying and distribution without alteration. The open access publication fee is USD 1,000 excluding taxes, payable by authors or on their behalf by a funder or institution, but all charges for articles submitted before 31 December 2028 are fully waived, making the journal free to publish in throughout its establishment period. Peer review is under the responsibility of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Geophysical Prospecting, and the journal is published bimonthly.

Publisher and readership

Publishing services are provided through KeAi Communications, the Beijing open access joint venture co-founded by China Science Publishing and Media and Elsevier and repurposed in 2013 as an open access journal publishing service provider, which now publishes more than 280 scholarly journals and provides the ScienceDirect platform, submission handling and production infrastructure through which the journal reaches its international readership. The journal's readers and authors are exploration and development geophysicists in industry and academia, seismic acquisition and processing specialists, rock physicists, reservoir geophysicists, logging and non-seismic specialists, and the growing communities applying geophysics to geothermal energy and carbon storage. For WorldNM's directory of Chinese magazines and scholarly journals, the Journal of Geophysical Prospecting is recorded at Zhuozhou, Hebei, owned by BGP Inc., CNPC, with its official KeAi journal page as its website, and distinguished from the separate Wiley journal Geophysical Prospecting.