About Geographical Research

Geographical Research

Geographical Research (地理研究, Dili Yanjiu) is a Chinese-language academic journal of geography published in Beijing. Its first volume appeared in 1982, and it is published by the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research (IGSNRR) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences together with the Geographical Society of China. The journal carries print ISSN 1000-0585 and maintains its official website at dlyj.ac.cn, where its full archive can be searched and downloaded. It is described in Chinese journal directories as a leading Chinese core journal in geography, a position it has built over more than four decades of continuous publication covering both physical and human geography.

Readers outside China should note a naming point that causes frequent confusion in library catalogues. This Beijing journal is entirely distinct from the Australian journal also titled Geographical Research, which is published in English by Wiley on behalf of the Institute of Australian Geographers. The two titles share English words but have different publishers, different ISSNs, different languages and different histories. The Chinese journal discussed here is identified unambiguously by ISSN 1000-0585, by its Chinese title 地理研究, and by its Beijing editorial home at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research.

Origins and founding in 1982

The journal's founding in 1982 places it in an important period for Chinese science. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw Chinese academic institutions rebuilding and expanding their publishing programmes after the reform and opening period began, and geography — a discipline that combines field observation, mapping, resource survey and regional planning — was among the fields that needed a dedicated national forum for comprehensive research. A bibliometric study published in the journal itself, drawing on the China Academic Journal Network Publishing Database and the Chinese Science Citation Database, examined the papers the journal published between 1982 and 2014, which confirms the 1982 starting point in the journal's own record.

That same study counted 3,574 papers published in Geographical Research from 1982 to 2014 in the CNKI database, of which 3,170 were analysed in detail after research reports, book reviews, conference notices and similar items were removed. A run of that size over its first three decades shows a journal that grew from a new title into one of the main channels through which Chinese geographers reported fieldwork, regional studies and theoretical discussion to a national readership.

The journal's official policies page reinforces the 1982 date in a practical way: it states that all articles have been digitally archived since the journal was founded in 1982, and that they can be searched and downloaded from the journal website. A complete digital back-run of that length is valuable for historians of the discipline, because it makes the evolution of Chinese geographical research — its topics, methods and regional priorities — traceable issue by issue from the early reform era to the present.

Publisher, sponsor and institutional home

The journal is published in Beijing by the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, together with the Geographical Society of China. Its policies page describes the editorial office of Geographical Research as the publishing department of the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resource Research, CAS, which receives the rights transferred by authors under the journal's copyright agreement.

That institutional pairing matters for understanding the journal's character. The Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research is the Chinese Academy of Sciences' principal institute for geography and natural resources research, so the journal sits inside a research organisation whose staff work on land use, water resources, ecosystems and regional development as their day jobs. The Geographical Society of China, the discipline's national learned society, connects the journal to university geography departments and research institutes across the country. A journal sponsored jointly by a national research institute and a national society can draw authors, reviewers and editors from both systems, and the composition of its editorial board, discussed below, shows exactly that pattern.

Scope: physical and human geography together

Geographical Research is a comprehensive geography journal rather than a single-subject title. Its stated coverage, as summarised in the journal's directory record, spans physical geography and human geography, regional development, land use and environmental change. That breadth is consistent with the Chinese tradition of geography as a synthetic, regional science concerned with the relationships between natural processes and human activity in particular places.

On the physical side, published work addresses topics such as hydrology and water resources, land surface processes, climate change, desertification, glacier and Quaternary studies, and landscape ecology. On the human side, the journal publishes urban geography, economic geography, rural geography and land-use research, tourism geography, historical geography, and work on geographic environment and human health. Cutting across both sides are geographic information science, remote sensing and cartography — methods that Chinese geographers use to measure land-cover change, model ecosystems and analyse spatial data.

The journal's own subject channels illustrate this range. Its website organises content into channels that have included articles and perspectives, work on plateau science and sustainable development, geographical studies of COVID-19, and material on industries and the management of rural revitalisation. Those channels are editorial groupings rather than permanent sections, but they show the editors actively assembling the journal's broad remit around questions — a pandemic, the future of the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the revitalisation of the countryside — where physical and human geography meet.

Land use, resources and environmental change

Land use and land-cover change form one of the journal's most recognisable research threads. The editorial board is anchored by specialists in exactly this area: the editor-in-chief's listed research field is land surface water and heat patterns and global changes, the executive associate editor works on land use, and board members include specialists in land use and cover change and ecosystem informatics, natural resource use, and land use and rural geography. When a journal's senior editors work in a field, that field tends to be well represented in its pages, and land research in Geographical Research addresses both the physical measurement of change — increasingly by remote sensing — and its human drivers in farming, urbanisation and policy.

Environmental change is the companion theme. Chinese geography has long been involved in documenting how environments respond to both natural variability and human pressure, in settings from the arid north-west to the humid south and the high Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Research of the kind the journal publishes in this area includes studies of vegetation change along major engineering corridors, analyses of temperature and precipitation trends, and work on desertification and soil erosion — the listed specialisms of individual board members confirm that these topics sit at the centre of the journal's expertise rather than at its margins.

Regional development and human geography

The journal's human geography coverage addresses how China's regions, cities and countryside develop. Directory summaries of its scope name regional development explicitly, and its board includes professors of urban geography, economic geography, tourism geography and human geography from institutions including Peking University, Sun Yat-sen University, Beijing Normal University, Nanjing Normal University and Northwest University. Research in this vein examines topics such as the social spatial structure of metropolitan areas — a frequently cited line of work in the journal analysed how Beijing's social areas changed between the 1982 and 2000 censuses — as well as rural transformation, tourism development and the geography of health and environment.

This human-geography side gives the journal a policy-facing dimension. Regional development, land administration, rural revitalisation and urban liveability are subjects on which Chinese government at national and local level actively plans, and a national geography journal that publishes both the physical evidence and the social analysis in one place serves readers in universities, research institutes and planning practice alike.

Editorial board and editorship

The journal's published editorial board page lists Professor Sun Fubao of the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research as editor-in-chief, with a research field given as land surface water and heat patterns and global changes. The associate editors-in-chief listed on the same page are Deng Wei of the Institute of Mountain Hazards and Environment, CAS (mountain science); He Canfei of Peking University (economic geography); Song Xianfang of IGSNRR (water cycle and water environment); Wang Shaoqiang of IGSNRR (ecology); and Wang Lixin of IGSNRR, marked as executive, whose field is land use.

Above the editors, the board page names a group of advisors whose names map the senior generations of Chinese geography: Sun Honglie, Liu Changming, Zheng Du and Lu Dadao, all academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences based at the institute, together with Liu Yanhua and Liu Jiyuan. The wider board includes members from Hong Kong and the United States — for example a transport geographer at the University of Hong Kong, a historical geographer at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and a geographic information scientist at the University of Tennessee — alongside professors from universities and CAS institutes across China. The editorial office staff listed on the page handle review, submission and editing work. Board pages change over time, so these names should be read as the journal's published board as listed on its official site, not as a permanent roster.

Peer review, ethics and publishing practice

The journal's official policies and ethics page sets out how manuscripts are handled, and it is unusually specific. Geographical Research states that it adopts a double-blind, three-round review system, and that its rate of acceptance is about 15 per cent. After submission, the editorial office conducts a preliminary review, guided by a published preliminary review checklist, before manuscripts proceed through the review rounds.

On ethics, the journal states that it complies with the Chinese scholarly publishing standard defining academic misconduct for journals (CY/T 174—2019), in which the misconduct of authors, reviewers and editors is defined in detail. It takes two rounds of repetition — that is, similarity — detection, at initial review and before publication. Once a manuscript is accepted and published, copyright owners sign a Copyright Transfer Agreement transferring rights of reproduction, distribution, online dissemination, translation and compilation to the editorial office, free of charge, worldwide. These published policies matter to authors choosing where to submit, because they describe a selective journal — roughly one manuscript in seven is accepted — with documented procedures against plagiarism and duplicate publication.

Place among China's geography journals

China supports a family of geography journals with different remits, and Geographical Research should be positioned carefully among them. Acta Geographica Sinica, the Geographical Society of China's flagship, is the discipline's oldest leading title, and it has an English-language companion, the Journal of Geographical Sciences. Scientia Geographica Sinica and Chinese Geographical Science — the latter an English-language journal from the Northeast Institute of Geography and Agroecology, published with Science Press and Springer — serve other parts of the field. Within that family, Geographical Research, published in Chinese from the discipline's central Beijing institute, is one of the core national titles: bibliometric research on Chinese geography routinely treats it alongside Acta Geographica Sinica, Scientia Geographica Sinica, Progress in Geography and Human Geography as one of the leading Chinese journals of the discipline.

Its directory description as a Chinese core journal reflects that standing. Core-journal status in China is consequential: it affects where researchers aim their best work, how universities evaluate publications, and which journals libraries prioritise. A journal founded in 1982 that retains core status more than forty years later, while archiving its complete run online, has demonstrated the continuity that such evaluations reward.

Reading and using the journal today

For a reader approaching Geographical Research today, the practical starting points are its ISSN, its website and its archive. The official site at dlyj.ac.cn provides browsable volumes back to the first volume of 1982 — the archive listing shows, for example, Volume 1, Issue 4 published in December 1982 — together with most-cited lists and subject channels. Articles carry DOIs in the form used by the journal, such as the 10.11821 prefix seen in citations to its papers, which lets individual articles be located and cited precisely even by readers who do not read Chinese, since titles and abstracts are presented in English on the site.

For researchers outside China, the journal offers something that English-language coverage of China often cannot: the domestic research conversation, in the language in which Chinese geographers write for each other, about Chinese land, water, cities and regions. Studies of land-use change, plateau environments, rural transformation and metropolitan social structure published here are primary sources for anyone tracing how those subjects have been studied inside China since 1982. That is the enduring value of Geographical Research: a comprehensive, institute-based, society-backed national journal whose four-decade archive records the development of modern Chinese geography itself.