About Resources Science

Resources Science

Overview and identity

Resources Science is a Chinese scholarly journal based in Beijing, China, founded in 1977 and formerly known as Natural Resources. Its editorial office is at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IGSNRR, CAS) in Beijing. It covers resource use, regional sustainability and resource–environment systems, and since the first issue of 2022 it has been a fully open access journal. This profile records the verified identity of the journal — its founding, editorial home, subject scope and open access policy — and explains the place it occupies in Chinese research on natural resources, taking care to distinguish it from the several similarly named titles in the same field.

That distinction matters more for this title than for most. Resources Science is not the Swiss open access journal Resources published by MDPI, not the Springer journal Natural Resources Research, and not the Journal of Natural Resources or the Journal of Resources and Ecology, the latter an English-language title established in 2010 that is also associated with the same Beijing institute. Citations, library records and submissions should therefore always use the exact title Resources Science together with its Beijing editorial office and its 1977 foundation, which together separate it unambiguously from every namesake.

History and development

Resources Science was founded in 1977, under the earlier name Natural Resources. Its long run spans the whole modern development of resources research in China: the period in which systematic surveys of land, water, mineral and biological resources were organised nationally, and the later period in which the central questions shifted from how much of a resource exists to how its use can be sustained within environmental limits. A journal founded at the earlier stage and still publishing at the later one is, in effect, a continuous record of that change of emphasis, written by the research community that carried it out.

The most recent change in the journal's own history is its conversion to open access. The journal flipped to a fully open access journal under the CC BY-NC-ND licence from the first issue of 2022, so that articles are free to read and download immediately and permanently on publication. The editorial office states that readers may also freely copy, disseminate and use all articles published since the journal's foundation in 1977 under the same licence policy, which gives the entire back file, and not only new issues, a clear and uniform legal status for readers.

Editorial home: the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research

The editorial office of Resources Science is at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Beijing. IGSNRR itself was founded by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1999, by integrating the Institute of Geography of the Chinese Academy of Sciences — whose own predecessor, the Chinese Institute of Geography, dated to 1940 — and the Natural Resources Comprehensive Investigation Committee of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, founded in 1956. The journal's home therefore joins the two traditions its title joins: geography and the comprehensive investigation of natural resources.

The institute's stated mission is to build a strategic scientific and technological force for resource and environment research that serves, guides and supports China's regional sustainable development, solving major scientific and technological problems in the field of resources and environment and acting as a think tank and talent pool for national and regional development, resource utilisation, environmental improvement and ecological civilisation construction. Its research system includes laboratories devoted to resource and environmental information systems, land surface pattern and simulation, regional sustainable development analysis and simulation, ecosystem network observation and simulation, and the land water cycle. A journal edited inside such an institute is closely connected to active survey, observation and modelling programmes, and its authors and reviewers are drawn from the same national research network. The institute also hosts the China Society of Natural Resources and sponsors a wider family of academic journals and popular science magazines, of which Resources Science is the title devoted specifically to resources science as a discipline.

Scope: resource use and resource systems

At the centre of the journal's scope is resource use: how land, water, energy, mineral and biological resources are measured, allocated and consumed, and with what efficiency and consequences. Work of this kind treats resources as systems rather than as isolated stocks, asking how a change in one resource — groundwater extraction, for example, or cultivated land conversion — propagates through the others and through the economies that depend on them. That systems view is what the journal's title announces: not a catalogue of individual commodities, but a science of resources in relation to one another.

For its readers, who are principally researchers and advanced students in geography, resources science and related fields in China, such articles provide both method and evidence: methods for accounting, evaluating and modelling resource flows that can be transferred between regions, and evidence from particular basins, provinces and resource types against which those methods are tested.

Scope: regional sustainability

A second major strand of the journal's coverage is regional sustainability. Regions are the scale at which resource decisions are actually taken in China — by provincial and local governments balancing development goals against land, water and environmental constraints — and the journal publishes research that evaluates how regions use their resource endowments over time, where the pressures are building, and which policy and management responses have measurable effects. This regional strand connects the journal directly to the sustainable development analysis and simulation work of its host institute, whose laboratories study regional development as a coupled human and natural process.

Because regional sustainability research must combine natural science measurement with economic and policy analysis, the journal's pages in this area are interdisciplinary by necessity, and they serve a readership that extends beyond academia to planning and resource management practice, where regional assessments inform decisions about land use, water allocation and ecological protection.

Scope: resource–environment systems

The third strand named in the journal's scope is resource–environment systems: the interactions through which resource exploitation changes environments, and environmental change in turn constrains or transforms resource availability. Articles in this area address questions such as the environmental cost of resource development, the carrying capacity of ecosystems under extraction and cultivation, and the feedbacks between resource scarcity, environmental degradation and regional livelihoods. It is the strand that most clearly separates Resources Science from a purely extractive or purely economic treatment of resources, and it reflects the combined resource-and-environment mandate of the institute in which the journal is edited.

Together, the three strands — resource use, regional sustainability and resource–environment systems — define a coherent editorial territory: the journal is the place where Chinese research that treats resources, regions and environments as one system is collected, reviewed and archived, rather than scattered across the separate journals of geology, agronomy, economics or ecology.

Open access, licensing and copyright

The journal's open access arrangements are stated in unusual detail on its official site, and they are part of its current identity. Since the first issue of 2022 the journal has been fully open access under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Once an article is published, readers can immediately and permanently read and download it for free via the journal's official website. Third-party reuse under the licence requires appropriate credit and a link to the licence, forbids commercial use, and does not permit distribution of modified versions of articles.

For manuscripts accepted by the journal, authors sign a Copyright Transfer Agreement transferring copyright to the Editorial Office of Resources Science. Authors nevertheless retain defined rights to use their own articles: reproducing, disseminating and using the article freely in accordance with the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence, for example in non-commercial academic seminars, communications, academic reports and lectures; using the article and its layout in compiling individual works or anthologies with the source acknowledged; and other uses permitted and authorised by the editorial office. Authors may also deposit all versions of their articles in an institutional or other repository of their choice, provided the articles' publishing information is given in the repository metadata and used as the recommended form of citation.

Readership, indexing and access

In addition to the journal's official website, the full texts of the journal's articles are archived in the database of CNKI, through which readers can obtain articles across the journal's run. The journal's standing in the Chinese evaluation system is reflected in its inclusion among the CSSCI-indexed journals of its field: a published bibliometric analysis of highly cited papers on resources and the environment in China selected Resources Science as one of five CSSCI journals in the area, alongside China Population, Resources and Environment, the Journal of Natural Resources, Resources and Environment in the Yangtze Basin and Arid Land Resources and Environment, and retrieved its papers from CNKI for citation analysis — evidence that the title is treated as one of the core Chinese outlets of resources and environment research.

For researchers, the practical consequence of the 2022 open access conversion combined with the CNKI archive is that the journal's whole history, from 1977 to the current issue, is reachable without a subscription barrier on the journal's own site, in the licence terms described above. Libraries and readers should nevertheless cite the journal by its exact title, for the reasons of disambiguation set out in the overview.

Place in Chinese scholarly publishing

Resources Science belongs to the academy-centred part of Chinese scholarly publishing, in which institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences maintain journals for the disciplines they lead. Edited at the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research in Beijing, carrying research on resource use, regional sustainability and resource–environment systems, and now publishing fully open access, it performs three functions at once: a disciplinary journal of record for resources science in China, a channel through which the institute's wider research network reports its findings, and, since 2022, a freely accessible archive of nearly five decades of Chinese resources research. On the verified facts assembled here — foundation in 1977 under the name Natural Resources, a CAS institute editorial home, a defined three-part scope and a complete open access conversion — it is one of the established titles of its field.