About Sciences in Cold and Arid Regions

Sciences in Cold and Arid Regions

Overview and identity

Sciences in Cold and Arid Regions is an English-language international journal of cold- and arid-region Earth-surface science, based in Lanzhou, Gansu, China. It was started in 2008 and is published bimonthly. It is identified by ISSN 1674-3822 and domestic number CN 62-1201/P. The journal is supervised by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and co-sponsored by the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Science Press and the Geographical Society of China, and published by Science Press. Its editorial office is at No. 8 Middle Tianshui Road, Lanzhou, Gansu 730000, China.

The journal — abbreviated SCAR, an acronym it shares, coincidentally, with the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research — is devoted to publishing the latest research achievements on the processes and patterns of the Earth surface system in cold and arid regions. Its sponsoring institute, now part of the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is China's national research centre for exactly those regions: the glaciers and permafrost of the Tibetan Plateau and the deserts and oases of the northwest.

Sponsorship and editorial home

The journal's own About page records its governance completely: supervised by the Chinese Academy of Sciences; sponsored by the Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute of CAS, Science Press and the Geographical Society of China; published by Science Press; copyright held by the institute and Science Press. The sponsoring institute — CAREERI, since reorganised as the core of the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources — is headquartered in Lanzhou, which is why a journal treating the whole world's cold and arid regions is edited from Gansu. Lanzhou is the gateway city to China's cold and arid northwest, and the institute's predecessor bodies — including the Lanzhou Institute of Glaciology and Geocryology — built China's glaciology and permafrost sciences there.

The Geographical Society of China's co-sponsorship connects the journal to the national geography profession, and Science Press publication places it inside the academy's publishing system. The editorial office address, No. 8 Middle Tianshui Road, Lanzhou, is printed in the journal's own pages, together with its postal distribution codes (overseas BM578, domestic 54-185) — the complete self-description of a Chinese academy journal.

Scope: cold regions

The journal's aims and scope divide its territory in two. Research in cold regions emphasises, first, the cold-region-characterised physical, chemical and biological processes and their interactions, and the response of the cryosphere to global change and human activities, together with the environmental effects and adaptation strategies that follow. Second, it focuses on the objects of cold-region science: glacier, snow, river, lake, sea ice, permafrost and seasonal frozen ground, and periglacial geomorphology. Third, it gives weight to cold regions engineering and technology — the building of railways, highways, pipelines and structures on frozen ground.

Its special-issue calls elaborate the same map: glacier changes and mass balance, including remote-sensing monitoring and modelling; snow cover processes; snow and glacier hydrology; ice–snow storm impacts; polar glaciers and environment; permafrost dynamics and engineering; climate change in cold regions; and palaeoclimate and palaeoenvironmental research. A memorial special issue for Professor Zichu Xie (1937–2020) — the pioneering glaciologist who directed the Lanzhou Institute of Glaciology and Geocryology from 1984 to 1991 and built Chinese glaciology into part of the international community — gathered work on glacier mass balance, snow cover, glacier change and climate response, permafrost dynamics and snow-and-ice hazards: the journal honouring, in its own pages, the founder-generation of its discipline.

Scope: arid regions

Research in arid regions mirrors the cold-region structure. It emphasises arid-region physical, chemical and biological processes and their interactions, and the response of arid regions to global change and human activities with their environmental effects and adaptation strategies. Its objects are desert, oasis, loess and aeolian landforms. And it supports integrated studies of mountain–desert–oasis systems in arid watersheds, organised around water resources, so as to provide reliable technological support for water safety, ecology safety and food safety in arid regions.

That last commitment — the mountain–desert–oasis system as an integrated object, with water as the master variable — is the signature framework of Lanzhou's arid-land science, developed for the inland river basins of the Hexi Corridor and Xinjiang, where mountain glaciers and snowmelt feed oasis agriculture surrounded by desert. A journal scoped this way publishes hydrology, ecology, geomorphology and engineering as one science, because its home watersheds demand all four at once.

History and development

The journal was started in 2008, in English, as an international journal — a founding choice that distinguishes it from most titles in this batch: where the university journals began in Chinese and added English presentation later, SCAR was conceived from Lanzhou as an English-language window on a Chinese research school with a strong claim to world leadership in its niche. Cold regions cover half the world's land area, and China holds a singular share of the mid-latitude cryosphere — the Tibetan Plateau, the “Third Pole” — together with some of the world's most studied deserts; an English journal from the institute that studies both was a logical instrument of that school.

The journal describes itself in its later announcements as a bimonthly open access international journal. Its volume sequence runs from 2008 forward — volume 12 in 2020, the year of the Xie memorial issue — and the title continues into the 2020s, with its sponsoring institute reorganised in the academy's restructuring into the Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources, as the candidate record for this profile notes.

A successor title: Research in Cold and Arid Regions

Bibliographic care is required at the journal's recent end. A journal titled Research in Cold and Arid Regions, published by KeAi, now presents the same aims and scope — the same cold- and arid-region framework, in updated wording — under ISSN 2097-1583 and e-ISSN 2949-7302 while carrying the same domestic number, CN 62-1201/P, as Sciences in Cold and Arid Regions. The shared CN number marks institutional succession: the KeAi title is the continuation of the Lanzhou journal under a new English title and publisher, in the pattern of Chinese academy journals migrating to international co-publishing platforms.

This profile concerns the journal as founded and published under the title Sciences in Cold and Arid Regions, ISSN 1674-3822, from 2008. Researchers should cite pre-succession material under that title and ISSN, and treat the KeAi title as its successor rather than as the same journal under a variant name.

Indexing and discovery

The journal's own announcements record its indexing coverage: the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), CAB Abstracts, Ulrich's Periodicals Directory, Japan Science and Technology Agency services, the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD), the China Science Periodical Database, the China Academic Journals network publishing database and the China Science and Technology Journal Database. Scopus covered the journal for a period before its coverage was discontinued in 2022, as directory summaries record — a discontinuation that precedes, and is consistent with, the title's transition to its successor form.

For discovery, the journal's own site at scar.ac.cn carries its aims, author guidance and archive; its articles carry DOIs under the journal's registered pattern (for example, 10.3724/SP.J.1226.2011.00187 for a 2011 article on twenty years of glacier observation at Tanggula Pass on the Tibetan Plateau).

Subject weight: the Third Pole and the inland basins

The science in the journal's pages is not generic Earth science with a cold adjective. Its representative article, cited in its own author guidance as the model journal reference, reports hydrological and climatological glacier observation over twenty years at Tanggula Pass on the Tibetan Plateau — the long, unglamorous, irreplaceable monitoring on which all cryosphere-change science rests, conducted by the journal's own sponsoring institute. Around such monitoring the journal builds its accounts of glacier change, permafrost dynamics and arid-basin water futures.

Cold-region engineering gives the journal a second, applied spine: its pages have carried the transportation-soil-engineering literature of building on frozen ground, including the work associated with the State Key Laboratory of Frozen Soil Engineering in Lanzhou — the laboratory behind the engineering of the Qinghai–Tibet railway across permafrost. Few journals anywhere join glaciology and railway engineering between the same covers; in Lanzhou they are one institute's business.

Readership and use

Readers are cryosphere and arid-land scientists, geographers, cold-region engineers and the water and land managers of arid watersheds, in China and internationally. For non-Chinese readers the journal — and now its successor — is a principal English-language source for the Lanzhou school's work on the Tibetan Plateau cryosphere, permafrost engineering and inland-basin ecohydrology. Cite the journal by its exact title with ISSN 1674-3822 and CN 62-1201/P for the 2008-onward Sciences in Cold and Arid Regions run.

Continuing role

Climate change is remaking cold and arid regions faster than almost any other environments on Earth, and the institute at Lanzhou remains China's designated centre for their study. Its journal — founded in 2008, published bimonthly in English by Science Press under ISSN 1674-3822, and continued in successor form as Research in Cold and Arid Regions — stands as the published bridge between that research school and the world: glacier, snow, permafrost, desert and oasis, studied as one Earth-surface system from the city where China's cold and arid regions meet.