About The Innovation Geoscience

The Innovation Geoscience

Overview and identity

The Innovation Geoscience is an English-language, open-access journal of Earth science based in Beijing, China, and published by Innovation Press. It was launched in 2023 as one of the sister journals of The Innovation, the broad-scope, open-access journal published by Cell Press in partnership with Youth Innovation Co., Ltd. The journal's electronic ISSN is 2959-8753. Indexing services also record the title in the shortened form Innovation Geoscience, with the standard abbreviation Innov. Geosci., while the publisher's own site uses the full name The Innovation Geoscience.

The journal's first article appeared in May 2023: an inauguration article titled The Innovation Geoscience: An international journal of Earth science, published as volume 1, issue 1, article 100001, with the DOI 10.59717/j.xinn-geo.2023.100001. By 2026 the journal had reached volume 4, with a January 2026 editorial titled What's next in Geoscience? published as article 100198. All articles are open access under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence.

Origins in The Innovation family

The Innovation Geoscience belongs to a family built around The Innovation, which was launched in 2020 by young scientists of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Youth Innovation Promotion Association together with Cell Press. The Innovation publishes basic and applied research that has impact for the benefit of society across all scientific disciplines — physics, chemistry, materials, nanotechnology, biology, medicine, geoscience and engineering — and it grew rapidly: it received a first Impact Factor of 33.1 from Clarivate in 2023, and ScienceDirect records later metrics including a CiteScore of 53.4. Its stated aims are to spark innovation, promote interdisciplinary collaboration, and provide a forum for research tackling important, emerging topics and the world's grand challenges.

On 25–28 June 2023 the family expanded with the introduction of four sister journals: The Innovation Life, The Innovation Geoscience, The Innovation Materials and The Innovation Medicine. A fifth sister journal, The Innovation Energy, followed on 26 February 2024. Each of these journals is presented as upholding the same rigorous standards as The Innovation itself, and the family's authorship is international — authors from 64 countries, cited by authors from 139 countries at the time of the sister-journal announcement. The Innovation Geoscience is the family's dedicated home for Earth science within that structure.

Scope across the geosciences

The Innovation Geoscience welcomes submissions from all fields of geoscience and from any source. Its recorded scope includes atmosphere and oceanography, geography, ecology, and Earth-system evolution, together with the full range of research on the solid Earth, its surface, its waters and its climate. The journal's founding editorial framed it as a collaborative platform for Earth scientists addressing planetary environmental challenges — a framing that matches its parent journal's emphasis on research with impact for society.

In bibliographic terms, the journal is classified in Earth and Planetary Sciences and in Environmental Science. That dual classification reflects the reality of modern geoscience, in which work on tectonics, geochemistry, climate, oceans, landforms and ecosystems is inseparable from environmental questions: how the Earth system is changing, what drives those changes, and what they mean for human societies that depend on stable climate, water, soil and coastlines.

The founding editorial team and its institutions

The journal's inauguration article was authored by eight scholars whose affiliations map the breadth of Chinese Earth science. The corresponding author, Wei Yang, is at the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. Co-authors were drawn from the Institute of Soil Science of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Nanjing, the Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry, the Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment in Chengdu, the Nanjing Institute of Geography and Limnology, and the Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology in Changchun, together with the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.

The team was international as well as national: it included Christoph Spötl of the Institute of Geology at the University of Innsbruck in Austria, and Hai Cheng of the Institute of Global Environmental Change at Xi'an Jiaotong University. The article was received on 19 April 2023, accepted on 19 May 2023 and published online on 28 May 2023, and it has since been viewed more than fourteen thousand times with close to three thousand PDF downloads recorded on the publisher's platform — an early indication of the visibility the Innovation brand brings to a new title.

Indexing, metrics and standing

The Innovation Geoscience has been indexed in Scopus since 2023, with coverage recorded from 2023 to 2026. In Scopus-based rankings it holds Q1 standing — the top quartile — in both Earth and Planetary Sciences (miscellaneous) and Environmental Science (miscellaneous). Its Scopus CiteScore is recorded as 6.3, and its SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) as 1.95. For a journal launched only in 2023, reaching Q1 in both of its subject categories within its first years of publication is a notable marker of citation performance, and it places the journal among the higher-ranked open-access titles in its fields.

The journal is also listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and in the UGC CARE list, according to journal directories that track its indexing. Its publisher is recorded as Innovation Press, with China as the country of publication, and its articles carry DOIs in the 10.59717 series used across The Innovation family, with the journal code j.xinn-geo.

Publishing model

The Innovation Geoscience is a fully open-access journal: its articles are immediately free to read, and the inauguration article is explicitly published under the CC BY 4.0 licence, which permits sharing and adaptation with attribution. The journal is published on The Innovation's own platform at the-innovation.org, where articles are presented with full citation information, PDF downloads and article-level metrics such as views and downloads.

That platform and brand distinguish the journal from China's other English-language geoscience titles. Rather than being published by a university or a learned society through a commercial partner, The Innovation Geoscience is part of a scientist-founded journal family whose flagship is a Cell Press partner journal. The family model gives the geoscience title shared editorial standards, shared production infrastructure and a shared readership with titles in life science, materials, medicine and energy, while leaving it free to build its own editorial identity within Earth science.

Position in Chinese and international geoscience publishing

China produces a large and growing share of the world's geoscience research, much of it from Chinese Academy of Sciences institutes of exactly the kind represented on the journal's founding team — geology and geophysics, geochemistry, soil science, mountain hazards, limnology and agroecology. An English-language, open-access, Q1-ranked journal based in Beijing gives that community a domestic venue with international reach, instead of requiring every high-impact geoscience paper from China to be placed with a journal based in Europe or North America.

At the same time, the journal's scope and its founding team's international membership position it to receive submissions from any country, and its classification across both Earth and planetary sciences and environmental science suits the interdisciplinary work — on climate change, Earth-system evolution, ecology and geography — that increasingly defines the field. Its January 2026 editorial asking What's next in Geoscience? suggests an editorial team actively setting an agenda for the discipline rather than simply receiving it.

Key facts

The Innovation Geoscience was launched in 2023 in Beijing, China, and is published by Innovation Press as a sister journal of The Innovation (ISSN 2666-6758), alongside The Innovation Life, The Innovation Materials, The Innovation Medicine and, from 2024, The Innovation Energy. Its own eISSN is 2959-8753. Its first article, the 2023 inauguration piece by Wei Yang and colleagues, appeared as volume 1, issue 1, article 100001, and the journal reached volume 4 in 2026.

It is an open-access journal, indexed in Scopus from 2023 with Q1 rankings in Earth and planetary sciences and environmental science, a CiteScore of 6.3 and an SJR of 1.95. It publishes research across all fields of geoscience, including atmosphere and oceanography, geography, ecology and Earth-system evolution, with a founding mission to provide a collaborative platform for Earth scientists addressing planetary environmental challenges.