About Oil and Gas Geology

Oil and Gas Geology

Oil and Gas Geology is a Chinese-language journal of petroleum geology founded in 1980 and published in Beijing. Its ISSN is 0253-9985 and its editorial site is hosted at ogg.pepris.com. For more than four decades it has recorded the major achievements of petroleum-geology research in China, from the exploration of the country's large onshore basins to the theory of hydrocarbon generation, migration and accumulation that guides drilling today. It is published by Science Press and is one of the most highly ranked Chinese-language titles in its field, holding a first-quartile position in geology in SCImago rankings and a Scopus CiteScore reported at 8.3 for 2024 and higher in subsequent metric releases.

Founding and mission

The journal states its objectives plainly: to record the significant achievements in the scientific research of petroleum geology, reflect the academic forefront in the field, promote academic exchanges at home and abroad, and raise the level of petroleum-geology research. Founded in 1980, it appeared at a formative moment for Chinese petroleum science, when exploration was expanding from the established eastern fields such as Daqing into western basins and offshore areas, and when Chinese geologists were developing their own theories of continental, or lacustrine, petroleum generation. A dedicated national journal gave that work a permanent, citable record. The full text of all articles since the 1980 founding is now freely downloadable from the official website, so the journal's archive functions as a continuous history of Chinese petroleum geology from 1980 to the present.

Columns and subject coverage

The journal's main columns, as listed on its official site, include Expert Forum, Petroleum Geology, Exploration and Development, and Technology and Methods, together with reports on the major achievements of petroleum exploration in China. Expert Forum carries authoritative reviews and strategic assessments by leading geologists. The Petroleum Geology column publishes research on source rocks, reservoirs, cap rocks, traps and petroleum systems. Exploration and Development addresses play evaluation, prospect appraisal and the geological aspects of field development, while Technology and Methods covers the geophysical, geochemical and analytical techniques on which petroleum geology depends. The reports on major exploration achievements document significant discoveries and breakthroughs, giving the journal a documentary as well as a research function within the national oil and gas industry.

Petroleum systems of China's basins

The substance of the journal is the petroleum geology of China's petroliferous basins. Eastern basins such as Songliao, Bohai Bay, North China and Subei; central basins such as Ordos and Sichuan; and western basins such as Tarim, Junggar, Qaidam and Turpan-Hami all feature regularly, as do offshore basins in the Bohai Sea and the South and East China Seas. Papers analyse source-rock quality and maturity, reservoir characterisation in sandstones and carbonates, fracture systems, unconventional resources including shale oil, shale gas and tight reservoirs, and the timing of hydrocarbon generation and trap formation. Because many Chinese reservoirs are continental in origin, the journal has carried influential work on lacustrine deposition, deltaic reservoirs and lithologic traps that differs from the marine-dominated literature of some other producing regions, making it an essential source for comparative petroleum geology.

Open access since 2010

Oil and Gas Geology is an open access journal. It flipped to open access in 2010, and readers can freely copy, disseminate and use all articles published since 1980 under its licence policy, the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. In addition to the official journal website, full texts are stored in the databases of CNKI, Wanfang Data and VIP, the principal Chinese scholarly platforms. For a journal of its age, the decision to open the entire backfile back to 1980 is significant: classic papers on the discovery and appraisal of major fields, which were previously accessible mainly in Chinese institutional libraries, can now be read by any researcher tracing the development of a play or the history of a basin study.

Awards and national recognition

The journal's standing within China is marked by national awards. It won the Third Prize of National Excellent Science and Technology Periodicals in 1996 and was selected among the One Hundred Key Journals of the Third National Journal Prize in 2005. It was rated a Chinese competitive science and technology periodical in 2008 and again in 2011. It appears on the lists of core journals maintained by the Chinese Science Citation Database in its core version and by Peking University's Chinese core periodicals overview, and it is included in more than twenty well-known databases and retrieval systems. In 2013 it was recorded in Engineering Index, EI, of the United States. Such listings matter in the Chinese academic system, where core-journal status affects university and institute evaluation, and they confirm the journal's place in the top tier of domestic geoscience publishing.

Indexing and citation performance

Internationally, the journal is indexed in Scopus, with coverage recorded from 2013 onward. SCImago places it in the first quartile for Geology, with an SJR reported at 1.926 in the most recent SCImago value listings, 126 documents published in 2025, and an h-index of 58. Scopus CiteScore values reported for the journal have risen strongly, from 8.3 for 2024 in the batch record to 9.4 in the latest CiteScore release summarised by journal-metric services. A two-year impact score above 4 has also been reported from Scopus data. These figures put Oil and Gas Geology among the highest-performing Chinese-language journals in the earth sciences, reflecting both the scale of Chinese petroleum research output and the centrality of the basins it covers to world energy supply.

Publisher and editorial base in Beijing

The journal is published by Science Press in Beijing, with its editorial office operating through the petroleum research publishing system reflected in its domain, ogg.pepris.com. Beijing is the headquarters city of China's national oil companies and of many petroleum research institutes, so the journal sits at the centre of the community it serves. Its authors include geologists from PetroChina, Sinopec and CNOOC research organisations, from China University of Petroleum and other universities, and from provincial and basin-level exploration institutes. That authorship gives its papers direct access to subsurface data, well results and seismic interpretation from active exploration programmes, data that are rarely available to journals outside the national industry.

Role in the energy transition debate

Although the journal's subject is hydrocarbons, its recent content engages with questions reshaping the industry: the appraisal of deep and ultra-deep reservoirs, the development of shale and tight resources, the geology of natural gas as a lower-carbon transition fuel, and the subsurface characterisation relevant to gas storage and carbon storage. By publishing the geological foundations for these topics in Chinese for the domestic research community, the journal supports both continued resource appraisal and the technical groundwork for new uses of the subsurface. Its Expert Forum column in particular provides a venue where senior figures debate exploration strategy and research priorities for the national industry.

How to access and cite the journal

Readers access Oil and Gas Geology through its official website at ogg.pepris.com, where the complete archive from 1980 onward can be downloaded free of charge, and through CNKI, Wanfang and VIP. International readers locate it in Scopus and SCImago under the title Oil and Gas Geology, ISSN 0253-9985, publisher Science Press, country China. Articles should be cited with that title and ISSN to distinguish the journal from similarly named publications in other countries and from its sister Chinese titles in the petroleum field, such as Petroleum Exploration and Development and China Petroleum Exploration, each of which has its own remit covered elsewhere in this directory. For any researcher working on Chinese petroleum systems, it is a primary source that cannot responsibly be skipped.