Earth-Science Reviews

Covering a much wider field than the usual specialist journals, Earth-Science Reviews publishes review articles dealing with all aspects of the Earth Sciences, and is an important vehicle for allowing readers to see their particular interest related to the Earth Sciences as a whole. Our readership is more diverse than that of specialist journals. The editors strive to ensure that reviews, even those that may otherwise appear in discipline journals, are accessible for all readers. Review articles must integrate and advance existing knowledge and highlight new directions by synthesizing, evaluating and discussing previously published literature; the value of such articles is also increased by authors’ own perspectives and comment. Review articles should be authoritative. They may also constitute a detailed introduction to/overview of a subject in a way that, for example, enables a researcher or graduate student to begin work in a new field.

Articles may be extensive, providing comprehensive coverage of a broad or cross-disciplinary subject, or they may be shorter yet provide an in-depth overview of a very specific topic. Authors may also include a small proportion of their own new data and analysis, both to demonstrate what is being done at the forefront of an area and to support their arguments, yet regular research articles will not be considered.

Submissions that aggregate previous literature and do not integrate and build on existing knowledge are unlikely to be accepted. Similarly, meta-analyses that do not include a significant review component in the way described above are also unlikely to be accepted. Bibliometric studies will not be considered. Where it is necessary to include bibliometric data in a review, that part of the article must be included in the supplementary information only. Regular research articles are only included in the occasional special issue, where the collection of papers together performs a review function. Review articles that are in practice regular research papers or case studies and that are not in a special issue will not be peer reviewed but will instead be recommended for discipline journals; a transfer option will enable such papers to be transferred quickly and easily to a discipline journal of the author’s choice. Articles on the biological, ecological, soil and agricultural sciences and on geoengineering should be submitted to journals in those fields.

Earth-Science Reviews offers authors the rare opportunity to explore a particular subject without any limitation on the number of words used. We do however encourage authors to adopt a writing style which balances conciseness with the need to do justice to their subject. Therefore, authors of review articles in excess of around 20,000 words should first discuss their idea by email with one of the journal editors, copied to Tim Horscroft, Review Papers Coordinator/Managing Editor ([email protected]), to ensure the project's suitability for potential publication.

Illustrations must be actual figures (maps, profiles, graphs, photos etc) and not repetitions in graphical form of the text. All figure captions, especially where the figure is from the literature, must state the message of the figure and not only be a statement of its content. This is especially important, in providing a service to the reader, in a review paper that uses illustrations from difficult to access sources.

From time to time, reviews on topics of exceptional or current interest, and of an exceptional standard, will be invited by the editors. These will be peer-reviewed in the same way as all articles. Invited reviews are published with the heading Invited Review.

The following are examples of what the editors consider good illustrations of the types of review articles that Earth-Science Reviews hopes to publish:

• Earth’s clay mineral inventory and its climate interaction: A quantitative assessment

• Landform-regolith patterns of Northwestern Africa: Deciphering Cenozoic surface dynamics of the tropical cratonic geosystem

• Strontium (87Sr/86Sr) mapping: A critical review of methods and approaches

• Exploring the multiple land degradation pathways across the planet

• Glacial terminations or glacial interruptions?

• Conceptualizing fluid-rock interaction diagenetic models with focus on tectonic settings

• Deep drilling in Antarctic ice: Methods and perspectives

• Quantifying the degradation of organic matter in marine sediments: A review and synthesis

• Fault linkage and relay structures in extensional settings

• Iron formations: A global record of Neoarchaean to Palaeoproterozoic environmental history

• Complementary classifications of aeolian dunes based on morphology, dynamics, and fluid mechanics

• Broken foreland basins and the influence of subduction dynamics, tectonic inheritance, and mechanical triggers

• Impact Earth: A review of the terrestrial impact record

• Subduction initiation from the earliest stages to self-sustained subduction: Insights from the analysis of 70 Cenozoic sites

This journal welcomes review-type papers within its scope that support and advance the UN's sustainable development goals, in particular SDG 13, (Climate Action) SDG 14 (Life below water) and SDG 15 (Life on land)