About Progress in Geography

Progress in Geography

Progress in Geography (地理科学进展, Dili Kexue Jinzhan) is a Chinese-language academic journal of geography published in Beijing. It was founded in 1982 and 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 ISSN 1007-6301 and publishes through its official website, progressingeography.com. As its title announces, its particular mission within Chinese geography is to review and report advances across the discipline — physical geography, human geography, geographic information science and global change research — combining review articles and theoretical discussion with original research.

The journal reached Volume 45 in 2026, a volume number that matches a continuous run from 1982, and its September 2026 number was Issue 9 of that volume, consistent with monthly publication. Its current issues show a journal still organised around its founding idea: sections for reviews and theoretical discussion, research articles, and a "Geographer" feature devoted to figures in the discipline's history, alongside special columns that gather work on a single theme.

Founding in 1982 and institutional home

Progress in Geography was founded in 1982, the same year as its Beijing sister journal Geographical Research. The pairing is not a coincidence: both titles are published by the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research with the Geographical Society of China, and together they gave the institute and the society two complementary national platforms at the start of the 1980s — one a comprehensive research journal, the other explicitly devoted to tracking progress across geography's sub-disciplines.

The early 1980s were a period of rapid rebuilding and expansion in Chinese academic publishing, as research institutions re-established journals and launched new ones to serve a growing research community. A progress-and-reviews journal answered a specific need of that moment: with Chinese geographers re-engaging with international literature and with new methods such as remote sensing and quantitative analysis entering the field, a journal that summarised where each branch of geography stood — and where it was heading — helped researchers orient themselves in a fast-moving discipline.

More than four decades later, the journal's volume sequence confirms an unbroken run. Volume 45 appeared in 2026, and recent volumes follow the same annual rhythm, with twelve issues a year. Continuity of that kind is itself a form of evidence about a journal's place in its field: sponsoring institutes do not sustain a monthly title for over forty years unless authors keep submitting to it and readers keep using it.

A journal built around reviewing a discipline

The feature that distinguishes Progress in Geography from a standard research journal is in its title. Its directory description states that it reviews and reports advances across physical geography, human geography, geographic information science and global change research. Its current issues preserve that design visibly: a recent issue's contents are divided into "Reviews and Theoretical Discussion", "Articles" and "Geographer", a structure that gives review and reflection a named, permanent place rather than treating them as occasional fillers.

Review journals perform a distinct service in a large research system. China produces geographical research at a scale that no individual can read unaided, across dozens of universities and institutes and many specialist journals. A journal that commissions and publishes considered reviews — of a sub-discipline's last decade, of a method's development, of a concept's travels between literatures — gives that system a shared map. The "Geographer" section extends the same reflective function to people: a recent example examined how Professor Huang Guozhang helped transform Chinese geography from traditional chorography into a modern academic discipline, drawing on his writings, textbooks, field reports and records of academic activities.

The journal's stated publication ethics reinforce this orientation. Its ethics statement describes Progress in Geography as oriented towards dissemination of the latest research findings and promotion of the development of geography science, committed to serving research on geography science and to placing academic quality first, reflecting the latest research findings in the various disciplines of geography science. That is the language of a journal whose job is synthesis and currency, not only novelty.

Scope across the geographical sciences

The journal's scope covers the full breadth of modern geography. In physical geography, that includes hydrology, geomorphology, climatology, glaciology, and the study of land surface processes and ecosystems. In human geography, it includes economic geography, urban and regional research, population geography, and social and cultural geography. Geographic information science — remote sensing, GIS and spatial analysis — forms a third strand, and global change research a fourth, cross-cutting one that links the physical and human sides through questions such as land-use change, carbon cycling and regional responses to climate change.

Topic analyses of the journal's contents bear this breadth out. Bibliometric summaries of its research profile identify China-focused studies, hydrology, land use, environmental resource management and economic geography among its leading subjects, with land cover, land-use change and forestry, economic growth and regional science, urbanisation and sustainable development appearing as connected themes. Those are exactly the topics a progress journal for Chinese geography would be expected to track, because they are where Chinese geographical research has been most active.

Special columns and the journal's thematic range

The journal's special columns show the same breadth applied to current questions. Recent columns have gathered work on geopolitics, on the high-quality development of the digital economy together with regional culture and tourism, and on the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. A special column lets the editors pull a fast-developing theme into focus — a new national strategy, a new technology, a new region — and publish a set of review and research papers on it together, which suits a journal whose readers come to it to find out where a field is moving.

Relationship to Geographical Research and the Beijing geography journals

Because Progress in Geography and Geographical Research share a founding year, a city, a sponsoring institute and a sponsoring society, they are sometimes confused, and researchers citing them need to keep the titles, ISSNs and editorial roles separate. Geographical Research (ISSN 1000-0585) is the comprehensive research journal; Progress in Geography (ISSN 1007-6301) is the progress and review journal. They publish different articles, run separate editorial operations through their own websites — dlyj.ac.cn and progressingeography.com respectively — and should be cited independently.

Within the wider family of Chinese geography journals, Progress in Geography is regularly grouped with the discipline's leading Chinese titles. A bibliometric study of social and cultural geography in China, for example, selected five leading Chinese journals for its Chinese-language sample — Acta Geographica Sinica, Scientia Geographica Sinica, Progress in Geography, Geographical Research and Human Geography — and analysed their contents over 2015–2020. Inclusion in such a core set, alongside the Geographical Society of China's flagship, indicates how the journal is regarded by researchers mapping the discipline.

The journal also appears in the Geographical Society of China's data-publishing arrangements. In a ranking of journal partners of the Global Change Research Data Publishing and Repository by comprehensive data impact score for 2018–2022, Progress in Geography placed in the Q2 group of partner journals. That connection reflects a broader movement among Chinese geography journals, begun with a joint proposal signed by dozens of journals in 2016, to publish and share the original scientific data associated with journal papers — an appropriate partner role for a journal concerned with the discipline's overall progress.

Indexing and international visibility

Although Progress in Geography publishes in Chinese, it is visible in international indexing. Scopus coverage of the journal is recorded from 2019 in current journal directories, which list it with a CiteScore of 4.2 and a SCImago Journal Rank of 0.614, placing it in the second quartile (Q2) across categories that include Earth and planetary sciences, ecology, geography, planning and development, and nature and landscape conservation. Those metrics describe the journal's recent international citation footprint; they should not be confused with the standing of the unrelated English-language SAGE journals Progress in Physical Geography and Progress in Human Geography, whose similar names are a persistent source of catalogue confusion.

Scopus indexing of a Chinese-language journal matters because it carries the journal's English titles and abstracts into the databases that international researchers actually search. A geographer outside China studying, say, land-use change or the Belt and Road Initiative can encounter this journal's review literature — including its frequently cited synthesis on scientific understanding of the Belt and Road Initiative and related research themes — through those records, even if reading the full Chinese text requires translation.

Within China, the journal's standing rests on the domestic evaluation system for Chinese academic journals, in which the titles sponsored by the national institute and society in Beijing form the recognised core of the discipline. Its combination of domestic core standing and recent international indexing gives it a dual audience: Chinese geographers for whom it is a home journal, and international readers who meet it through abstracting services.

Peer review and publication ethics

The journal publishes a detailed publication ethics and malpractice statement on its official site, modelled on international publishing-ethics practice. It states that the journal adopts a peer review system in processing manuscripts, and that reviewing experts are to review manuscripts scientifically, scrupulously, objectively and fairly, and to report to the editorial board if they find multiple submission, misconceptions, intellectual errors, suspected plagiarism or fabrication.

For editors, the statement requires the editorial board to follow the journal's objectives, process manuscripts objectively and fairly, encourage discussion and contention between different academic viewpoints, and select excellent papers meeting the journal's requirements. It provides that editors will be guided by the COPE guidelines for retracting articles when considering retractions, expressions of concern and corrections, that editors should preserve the anonymity of reviewers, and that before publication the editorial board signs a copyright transfer agreement with the author under the Copyright Law of the People's Republic of China. The board may invite experts or use the Misconduct Literature Detection System (AMLC) to screen manuscripts against academic misconduct, and where validated evidence of misconduct is found, the manuscript is returned and the author — or the author's research team or institution — is informed.

For a review journal, one clause is especially apt: the explicit encouragement of discussion and contention between different academic viewpoints. Reviews and theoretical discussions are where a discipline argues with itself about concepts and directions, and an ethics framework that protects that contention, while policing fabrication and plagiarism, fits the journal's mission.

What the journal publishes: themes in recent issues

Recent contents illustrate how the journal's remit plays out in practice. Review and theoretical articles have addressed subjects such as the geographical thinking and spatial logic of new quality productive forces — an attempt to interpret a current Chinese policy concept through geography's core ideas of temporal evolution, human-environment coordination, regional differentiation and industrial change — and the progress of population geography in China over the past century. Research articles span topics from the migration patterns of elderly sojourners within China to transport geography and regional development.

Historical reflection remains a live strand. The "Geographer" feature's study of Huang Guozhang concluded that, through curriculum reform, textbook compilation, journal publishing, the establishment of research organisations and participation in academic associations, he advanced the institutionalisation and modernisation of geography in China. A progress journal that also publishes the history of its own discipline gives readers the long view as well as the latest results — both are forms of orientation.

Reading the journal: audiences inside and outside China

Taken together, Progress in Geography occupies a clear niche in Chinese scholarly publishing: a monthly, Beijing-based, institute- and society-sponsored journal, founded in 1982, that exists to tell Chinese geography where it has got to. Its ISSN 1007-6301, its review-led structure, its Scopus-indexed recent volumes and its place in the discipline's recognised core set of journals make it a reference point for anyone — inside China or outside — who needs to understand the direction of Chinese geographical research.