Journal of Earth System Science
The Journal of Earth System Science is an English-language, peer-reviewed, bimonthly journal covering the Earth as an interacting system — the solid earth, atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere, together with related planetary and space sciences. Published from Bengaluru by the Indian Academy of Sciences and published internationally by Springer on the Academy's behalf, it took its present name in 2005. Before that it appeared for more than a quarter of a century as Proceedings – Earth and Planetary Sciences, and its roots lie in the Academy's original Proceedings of 1934.
From the 1934 Proceedings to a Theme Journal
The journal was earlier part of the Proceedings of the Indian Academy of Sciences – Section A, begun in 1934, the year the Academy was founded by Sir C. V. Raman and issued its first Proceedings. Section A covered the physical sciences, and earth-science papers appeared within it for more than four decades.
In 1978 the Academy split Section A into theme journals. The earth-science strand was published from 1978 as Proceedings – Earth and Planetary Sciences, continuing the parent volume sequence, alongside two sibling journals that became the Journal of Chemical Sciences and Proceedings – Mathematical Sciences. The creation of a separate earth and planetary sciences title recognised that geology, geophysics, atmospheric science and oceanography formed a coherent community that a general physical-sciences proceedings no longer served well.
Renamed in 2005
In 2005, Proceedings – Earth and Planetary Sciences was renamed Journal of Earth System Science. The new name was a deliberate repositioning, not just a modernisation. "Earth system science" describes a way of studying the planet as a whole — in which the geosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere and biosphere interact — rather than as a set of separate compartments. By adopting it, the journal signalled that it wanted integrated, process-based studies of the Earth system, and its scope statement was written to match.
Bibliographic records preserve both identities: the former name is listed as Proceedings of the Indian Academy of Sciences (Earth and Planetary Sciences), with the journal's history under that title running from 1978 to 2004, and its current title from 2005. Its print ISSN, 0253-4126, continued across the rename, anchoring the two titles as one serial; its web ISSN is 0973-774X, and its ISO 4 abbreviation is J. Earth Syst. Sci.
A Highly Interdisciplinary Scope
The Academy describes the journal as highly interdisciplinary, publishing scholarly research — new data, ideas and conceptual advances — in Earth system science. Its focus is the evolution of the Earth as a system. Its scope includes the solid earth, or geosphere; the atmosphere; the hydrosphere, including the cryosphere; and the biosphere; and it also addresses related aspects of planetary and space sciences.
That breadth is intentional and demanding. A single issue can in principle span a study of the deep earth, a monsoon or climate investigation, an ocean or glacier study, and a paper on ecological processes, provided each speaks to the behaviour of the Earth system. The journal is therefore not a geology journal, a meteorology journal or an oceanography journal, but a home for work that connects such fields — the kind of work that disciplinary journals sometimes find hard to place.
What Makes a Paper Suitable
Unusually among journals, the Journal of Earth System Science spells out the tests a manuscript must pass, because so many submissions report observations or model results for a limited domain. A paper intended for the journal is expected to meet at least one of three criteria: the data should be relevant, of statistically significant size, and from a region where such data are sparse — or, if from a well-sampled region, of considerable size and advancing knowledge of that region; or a model study should be carried out to explain observations reported in the same manuscript or in the literature; or the analysis, whether of data or with models, should be novel and its inferences should advance current knowledge.
The journal also states a limit plainly: manuscripts describing changes of anthropogenic origin in a limited region are not considered unless they go beyond describing the changes to include an analysis of Earth-system processes. Together, these rules define the journal's editorial personality — welcoming of regional work, especially from data-sparse areas, but insistent that local description be lifted into system-level understanding.
A Particular Welcome for the Indian Subcontinent
Contributions pertaining to the Indian subcontinent and the surrounding Indian Ocean region are particularly welcome, the journal states. That emphasis follows naturally from its institutional home and from the science itself: the region contains the Himalaya, the Indian monsoon system and the northern Indian Ocean, all of first-order importance to understanding how the Earth system works, and historically under-represented in the international literature relative to their significance.
For researchers in India and neighbouring countries, the journal offers a peer-reviewed, internationally distributed outlet that actively values regional data meeting its criteria. For international readers, it is a reliable source of work on South Asian and Indian Ocean earth processes that might be scattered across many disciplinary titles elsewhere.
Publisher, Editors and Frequency
The journal is published by Springer Science+Business Media on behalf of the Indian Academy of Sciences, whose headquarters in Bengaluru is the journal's home. It is one of the Academy's twelve journals, and, like the others, its content is available through the Academy's own website as well as through Springer's platforms.
Published records name Professor Somnath Dasgupta, an emeritus professor, as editor-in-chief, while more recent journal-metric listings name N. V. Chalapathi Rao of Banaras Hindu University in that role — a reminder that editorship of Academy journals rotates among senior researchers in the field. The journal appears bimonthly, a frequency recorded consistently across its listings under its present title.
Indexing and Standing
The journal is indexed in Scopus and the standard abstracting and citation services for the earth sciences. According to the Journal Citation Reports, it had a 2021 impact factor of 1.912. Other current listings record a CiteScore of 2.5, an h-index of 63 and a SCImago rank in the second quartile for earth and planetary sciences, with one journal database recording 203 articles published in 2025 — a substantial annual volume that reflects the breadth of its remit and the size of the community it serves.
Those figures place it as a solid mid-sized international journal in its field: not a mega-journal, but a well-established title whose archive, running in continuous sequence from the 1978 theme journal and ultimately from the 1934 Proceedings, gives it a depth few earth-science journals in Asia can match.
Audience
The journal's audience is earth scientists across the discipline's branches — geologists, geophysicists, atmospheric and climate scientists, oceanographers, hydrologists, cryosphere and biosphere researchers, and planetary scientists — in universities, survey and research organisations, and agencies concerned with the planet's behaviour. Its interdisciplinary brief particularly suits readers whose work crosses compartments of the Earth system, and its explicit criteria suit authors holding valuable data from under-sampled regions who need a journal that understands why such data matter.
Students and teachers also use it as a window on how earth system science is practised in and on South Asia, since its pages concentrate regional research that is otherwise dispersed.
Significance
The Journal of Earth System Science shows an old institution adapting its publishing to a new scientific idea. The Academy created it as a conventional earth and planetary sciences proceedings in 1978; a generation later it renamed and redefined the journal around the Earth-system concept, with scope rules written to enforce that concept editorially. The rename of 2005 was thus one of the clearer examples in Indian publishing of a journal changing its intellectual mission while keeping its serial identity, archive and academy ownership intact.
Published today from Bengaluru under a name that states its ambition — the Earth, studied as a system — it continues to do what its scope promises: to publish new data, ideas and conceptual advances about how the solid earth, air, water and life interact, with a standing invitation to the scientists of the Indian subcontinent and the Indian Ocean region to contribute their part of that planetary story.
