About Journal of Geodesy and Geoinformation Science

Journal of Geodesy and Geoinformation Science

The Journal of Geodesy and Geoinformation Science (JGGS) is an English-language quarterly scholarly journal established in 2018 in Beijing, China. It is published by Surveying and Mapping Press, also known as SinoMaps Press, and carries print ISSN 2096-5990 and electronic ISSN 2096-1650. The journal was created to strengthen academic exchange between China and other countries in geodesy and geoinformation research, and its stated aims are to facilitate and strengthen that exchange by providing an English-language platform for Chinese and international researchers working on the measurement of the Earth, satellite navigation and geospatial information. Its archive runs continuously from Volume 1 in 2018 through Volume 8 in 2025, a record that confirms an unbroken quarterly publication history since its founding. The journal is indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals and in Scopus, where 2025 metrics record a CiteScore of 3.2, and it is listed in the Chinese core science and technology journal catalogue. For readers of WorldNM, it is important to distinguish this journal from the older, Chinese-language Acta Geodaetica et Cartographica Sinica, which has been covered separately; the two titles serve different language communities and were founded in different eras, even though they address overlapping subject matter.

Founding and purpose

The founding of the journal in 2018 reflected a deliberate decision to give Chinese geodesy and geoinformation research a dedicated English-language outlet. By the late 2010s, Chinese research groups were producing large volumes of work on satellite geodesy, the BeiDou Navigation Satellite System, remote sensing and digital mapping, yet much of that work was published in Chinese-language journals and therefore reached international readers only slowly, through abstracts and citations. An English-language quarterly published from Beijing was intended to shorten that distance. The journal's own statement of purpose, reproduced in indexing directories, is explicit: it aims to facilitate and strengthen academic exchange on geodesy and geoinformation research between China and other countries. That purpose shapes its editorial practice. Papers are published in English, the journal is listed as open access in the Directory of Open Access Journals, and the DOAJ record notes that the journal does not charge article processing charges, a policy that lowers barriers for both authors and readers. The combination of English-language publication, open access and a Beijing base makes the journal a bridge publication, carrying Chinese surveying and mapping research outward while also inviting contributions and readership from outside China.

Publisher and institutional home

The journal is published by Surveying and Mapping Press, known in English-language listings as SinoMaps Press. Surveying and mapping publishing in China has historically been closely tied to the national surveying, mapping and geoinformation administration, and the press is the specialist publisher for cartographic and geodetic literature in the country. Being issued by that press places the journal inside China's official mapping tradition rather than inside a commercial publishing group, and it explains the journal's close attention to standards, reference systems and national geospatial infrastructure. The editorial base is in Beijing, the city recorded for the journal in its directory entry. Beijing is also home to the headquarters of China's surveying and mapping institutions, to the Chinese Academy of Surveying and Mapping and to many of the research groups that contribute to the journal. That concentration matters for a geodesy journal, because geodesy underpins national reference frames, height systems and positioning services, all of which are coordinated nationally. The journal therefore functions both as a scientific periodical and as a record of how a national mapping establishment presents its research to the world.

Scope: geodesy, GNSS and geoinformation

The journal accepts papers covering a broad range of geodesy and geoinformation topics, including geodesy itself, remote sensing, geoinformation science, GNSS and 3D modelling, together with related interdisciplinary sciences. Geodesy, in this context, is the science of measuring and representing the Earth, including its gravity field, its rotation and the precise positions of points on its surface. GNSS, the global navigation satellite systems family that includes GPS, Galileo, GLONASS and China's BeiDou system, is central to modern geodesy because satellite positioning provides the observations from which reference frames and deformation measurements are derived. Remote sensing contributes Earth-observation data from satellites and aircraft, while geoinformation science concerns the storage, analysis and visualisation of spatial data. Three-dimensional modelling connects these strands to applications such as digital cities and terrain representation. The journal describes itself as concerned with the scientific problems of geodesy, remote sensing, geoinformation and related interdisciplinary sciences, which signals that it welcomes work at the boundaries between these fields, for example studies that combine GNSS observations with remote-sensing imagery to monitor ground deformation, rather than only single-discipline contributions.

Geodesy in the BeiDou era

The timing of the journal's launch is significant. It appeared in 2018, during the final build-out of the BeiDou-3 global navigation satellite system, which China completed in 2020. BeiDou gave Chinese geodesists a nationally operated constellation whose signals, ground stations and precise products required sustained scientific publication, including work on orbit determination, clock estimation, atmospheric delays and precise point positioning. A domestic English-language journal devoted in part to GNSS was therefore well placed to publish BeiDou-related research for an international audience that was itself evaluating the new system. Geodesy journals also publish on satellite gravimetry, tide gauges, Earth rotation parameters and crustal motion, all areas in which Chinese institutions operate extensive observing networks across a large and tectonically active territory. Earthquakes, subsidence in major cities and deformation around large engineering projects such as dams and high-speed rail lines create continuing demand for precise geodetic monitoring in China, and that demand feeds research papers. The journal's scope, which pairs classical geodesy with geoinformation and 3D modelling, mirrors how the discipline has evolved from measuring positions to building dynamic, data-rich representations of the Earth's surface.

Publication pattern and archive

The journal is published quarterly, giving four issues per volume and one volume per year. Its archive runs continuously from Volume 1 in 2018 through Volume 8 in 2025, so a reader can trace eight complete years of publication without gaps. Quarterly frequency is common for specialist English-language journals launched by Chinese presses, because it allows editorial offices to assemble peer-reviewed issues of manageable size while maintaining regular appearance in indexing services. The journal's own website, given in its directory record as jggs.chinasmp.com, provides access to its contents for readers. Continuity of the archive matters for evaluation: indexing services and library catalogues treat an unbroken run as evidence of a stable journal, and the Scopus coverage recorded for the title, with coverage history listed as 2021 to 2024 in one directory and a 2025 CiteScore of 3.2 reported in another, shows that the journal entered international abstracting within a few years of its launch. Its listing in the Chinese core science and technology journal catalogue adds domestic recognition alongside the international indexing.

Indexing and metrics

The journal is indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, which lists it under Surveying and Mapping Press with both ISSNs and subject coverage spanning geology, Earth and planetary sciences, elementary surveying and topography, geodetic surveying, photogrammetry and remote sensing, and cartography. The DOAJ entry also records an average period of about 30 weeks between submission and publication and indicates that there are most likely no article processing charges, information that is useful to prospective authors comparing outlets. In Scopus-based listings, the journal appears in the Earth and Planetary Sciences (miscellaneous) and Geology categories, with quartile positions recorded as Q2 in those categories in Resurchify's summary of Scopus data. The 2025 Scopus journal metrics reported through the Wageningen library record give a CiteScore of 3.2, with rankings inside the Geology category of Earth and Planetary Sciences. CiteScore measures the average citations received by documents published in a journal over a defined window, so a value of 3.2 indicates a moderate, established citation presence for a young specialist title. Readers should treat third-party impact summaries with care, since some aggregator sites contradict each other on indexing status; the more reliable indicators are the DOAJ listing itself and the Scopus metrics reported by library services.

Relationship to China's surveying and mapping tradition

China has a long institutional history of surveying and mapping, from imperial cartography to the modern national mapping programmes that produced topographic coverage of the entire country. The journal sits within that tradition but addresses its contemporary, satellite-based phase. Modern Chinese geodesy operates national continuously operating reference station networks, contributes to global geodetic observing systems and supports the geographic information industry that supplies mapping data to government, business and the public. A journal that combines geodesy with geoinformation science reflects the merger of the measurement tradition with the data tradition: precise coordinates are now the foundation for geographic information systems, location-based services and spatial planning. The presence of photogrammetry and cartography in the journal's indexed subject coverage is a reminder that image-based measurement and map-making remain part of the field, even as satellite positioning dominates precise work. By publishing in English, the journal also documents this national capability for external readers, including researchers who collaborate with Chinese institutions on global reference frames and Earth observation.

Readership and authors

The natural readership of the journal consists of geodesists, GNSS specialists, remote-sensing scientists, geographic information researchers, photogrammetrists and cartographers, together with engineers who use precise positioning in practice. Authors are drawn heavily from Chinese universities, academies and surveying institutions, which is consistent with the journal's founding purpose of presenting Chinese research internationally, but the exchange aim implies openness to international authors as well. For a specialist reader, the value of such a journal lies in access to results from Chinese observing networks and systems that may be reported first, or in most detail, in a Chinese-published English journal: BeiDou performance studies, regional reference-frame realisations, deformation monitoring of Chinese infrastructure and geoinformation methods developed for Chinese cities and landscapes. The quarterly schedule and open-access availability make individual articles easy to obtain through the journal website and indexing services, and the absence of article processing charges recorded by DOAJ removes a cost barrier that affects many newer open-access titles.

Distinguishing similar titles

Several similarly named journals exist, and careful distinction protects readers from citation errors. The Journal of Geodesy, published by Springer since the 1990s under that name, is a separate, older international title with different ISSNs and should not be confused with this Beijing journal. Within China, the Acta Geodaetica et Cartographica Sinica is the long-established Chinese-language journal of the field and has been profiled separately in this directory. The Journal of Geo-Information Science, also published from Beijing but by Science Press and in Chinese, covers geographic information science and is a different title again, profiled separately in the same batch of this directory. The distinguishing marks of the present journal are its English language, its 2018 founding, its quarterly frequency, its publisher Surveying and Mapping Press (SinoMaps Press), and its ISSN pair 2096-5990 and 2096-1650. Checking those identifiers is the reliable way to confirm that a citation or a library record refers to this journal and not to one of its near-namesakes.

Place in the directory

In the WorldNM directory, the Journal of Geodesy and Geoinformation Science is classified as a magazine-category outlet, the directory's term for periodicals, based in Beijing, Beijing, China. It represents the youngest generation of Chinese scientific periodicals: founded in the late 2010s, born into the open-access and Scopus-indexing environment, and designed from the start for international exchange rather than adapted to it later. Its eight-volume archive through 2025, its CiteScore of 3.2 in 2025 metrics, its listing in the Directory of Open Access Journals and in the Chinese core science and technology journal catalogue together describe a journal that has completed its establishment phase and entered the regular economy of citations and submissions. For researchers tracking how China communicates its Earth-measurement science to the world, and for librarians distinguishing among China's several geodesy and geoinformation titles, this journal is a key reference point.