Editorial: review of 2013 and expectations for 2014

Abstract

The past 2013, the fifth year since the commencement of Journal of Arid Land (JAL), witnessed positive progress in all aspects of the journal. Notable achievements have been made under the joint efforts from Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS, the superintending authority of JAL), the editorial board and the editorial staff. In 2013, the journal was selected into the First and Second Ranking List of Scientific-Technological Journals by CAS Publication Fund, and covered by the databases of Scopus and CSCD (Chinese Science Citation Database). Partnership with Springer was also initiated in the same year, under the agreements of which Springer has exclusive distribution rights for both print and electronic versions of JAL outside Mainland China. The Springer online information platform (SpringerLink) is believed to be able to help disseminate the journal to a global audience and ultimately improve its communication among international researchers of all related fields. According to statistics from SpringerLink, monthly full-text downloads of JAL increased from a minute 12 in January to an appreciable 182 in June. Online First service, as another convenience offered by the collaboration, will significantly shorten the time lag of publication and the duration of citation latency. Compared with the previous year, the JCR (Journal Citation Reports) Impact Factor (IF) of JAL declined slightly, while the non-self-cited rate increased from a low 16% in 2011 to a high 68% in 2012. As predicted from the current available data from Web of Science, the IF of JAL is expected to reach 0.6 or higher. At the advent of a new year, the editorial staff of JAL would like to extend their sincerest thanks to all the peer reviewers who have either volunteered or been invited to participate as providers of valuable comments. Up to this date, we have LIU XueJun, Jiang FengQing, TANG LiSong, WEI ChangZhou, ZHANG BaiPing, ZUO XiaoAn and ZHANG YuanMing who contributed the largest number of reviews. JAL is also grateful to all its authors for publishing with it. The six largest contributors to JCR Impact Factor are as in Table 1. In 2013, under the supportive organization of Professor NOWAK S Robert (University of Nevada, USA), JAL spared two consecutive issues for the special column of “Invasive Species and Global Change”, which reported and discussed the latest developments in species invasion and global climate change in China, Central Asia, Europe, the United States, Australia and New Zealand (e.g. Radford, 2013). A considerable number of pages from the same two issues were further dedicated to the special column of “Carbon Cycle and Global Change” to present recent research advances in carbon cycle dynamics and vegetation production process under arid environments in Central Asia, primarily Northwest China (e.g. Zheng et al., 2013). In the forthcoming 2014, JAL will continue to invite its editorial board members into the planning of columns that cover hydrology, vegetation and microorganisms under the context of aridity at regional and global scales. The year 2014 will also witness the change of JAL from a quarterly to a bimonthly