AGU Journals Research Articles

Thank You to Our 2023 Reviewers

AbstractThe editors of Tectonics would like to offer our sincere thanks to those who reviewed manuscripts for us in 2023. The time reviewers spend reading and commenting on manuscripts helps to ensure that our science is well communicated, clearly documented, appropriately placed in the context of prior work, and effectively archived for future usage. We understand that as one of the AGU journals hosting long format articles, reviewing a manuscript for Tectonics is a considerable time commitment. For this reason, we are particularly grateful to our reviewers for their diligence in helping to provide high‐quality, timely reviews. We also appreciate the efforts many reviewers contribute toward advancing open science by evaluating the availability and accessibility of data, which are key objectives of the AGU's FAIR data policy. The 137 papers published in Tectonics in 2023 benefitted from the careful scrutiny and constructive critique drawn from the expertise of 465 reviewers, who provided a total of 652 reviews. We are grateful for this contribution toward producing the high‐quality output that has helped Tectonics maintain a prominent position in scientific publishing for decades, and for the spirit of teamwork that makes the peer review process an asset in our community.

AGU Publications Opens Science: Making Science Accessible and Equitable

To celebrate the Year of Open Science, we highlight our efforts to make AGU journals and books more open, accessible, and inclusive.

Thank You to Our 2022 Reviewers

AbstractPerspectives articles pose a unique challenge for reviewers, compared to other AGU journals. Most scientific journals follow a fairly standard format and style, but this is not the case with Perspectives, where articles can take many different forms. Most scientific journals also discourage the incorporation of an author's personality, but for Perspectives it is requested. This means that reviewers have to evaluate Perspectives articles not only on the accuracy and validity of their scientific content but also on the quality of the storytelling involved, with an eye toward their usefulness in both documenting the history of our fields and in inspiring the future scientists of tomorrow. Perspectives is a relatively new and expanding journal. Last year we had 17 reviewers to thank; this year the number is up to 56. We are very grateful for the wisdom and flexibility shown by our reviewers, and the entire editorial board of Perspectives would like to express our deep appreciation for all the work they have done. Thank you!

60 Years and Beyond of Reviews of Geophysics

AbstractReviews of Geophysics is an AGU journal, first established in February 1963. It is a hybrid open access invitation‐only journal that publishes comprehensive review articles across various disciplines within the Earth and Space Sciences. The selection criteria are rigorous and many submissions are declined without review. The journal is the highest ranked in the fields of Geochemistry and Geophysics, with a high Journal Impact Factor (JIF2021 = 24.9), which is indicative of its high visibility and influence within the scientific community. The journal's published review papers, beyond a mere summary of literature, provide crucial context for current work, and establish the framework for comprehensive understanding of research progress, challenges, and interconnections between different communities, so that research may be appreciated by a broad audience. We emphasize the importance of publishing studies that provide a comprehensive overview and synthesis of the current state of knowledge in a field, especially in the case of geophysics, where knowledge is rapidly developing, increasing and becoming more specialized.

Aims and Scope of JAMES

AbstractThe mission of AGU's Journal of Advances in Modeling Earth Systems (JAMES) is to publish original research papers that advance the science underlying Earth system models and emerging from their use. JAMES' scope encompasses the outer envelope of the Earth system including the atmosphere, oceans, land surface, and cryosphere. It publishes papers that expand capabilities to model, understand, and predict the Earth system and the physical, chemical, and biological processes shaping it. In this editorial, we present general principles as well as specific notions that guide the strategy of JAMES' editors in realizing the journal's mission. This document serves as an update to Griffies et al. (2021), https://doi.org/10.1029/2021MS002567.

Sewing DEI Into the Fabric of the Geosciences

AGU journals host a new living special collection on diversity, equity, and inclusion in the geosciences and invite additional contributions to grow this collection.

Inventorying Earth’s Land and Ocean Greenhouse Gases

A new special collection in AGU journals will present findings from the Second REgional Carbon Cycle Assessment and Processes (RECCAP2) study with a decade of data on greenhouse gas growth.

Effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Authors and Reviewers of American Geophysical Union Journals.

The COVID‐19 pandemic affected the scientific workforce in many ways. Many worried that stay‐at‐home orders would disproportionately harm the productivity and well‐being of women and early‐career scientists, who were expected to shoulder more childcare, homeschooling, and other domestic duties while also interrupting field and lab research, essential for career advancement. AGU journal submission and author and reviewer demographic data allowed us to investigate the effect the pandemic may have had on many Earth and space scientists, especially on women and early career scientists. However, we found that submissions to AGU journals increased during the pandemic as did total submissions from women (with no difference in the proportion). Although the rate at which women agreed to review decreased slightly (down 0.5%), women still made up a larger proportion of agreed reviewers during the pandemic compared to 2 years earlier. Little difference was seen overall in median times to complete reviews except with women in their 40s and 70s, suggesting that they were affected more during the pandemic than other age and gender groups. Although AGU's data do not show that the effects of the pandemic decreased women's participation in AGU journals, the lag between research and writing/submitting may still be seen in later months, which we will continue to report on as we analyze the data. The stay‐at‐home orders may also have allowed people to devote time to writing up research conducted prepandemic; writing too can be done during down‐time hours, which may have supported the increase in submissions to and reviews for AGU journals.

Geoscientists, Who Have Documented the Rapid and Accelerating Climate Crisis for Decades, Are Now Pleading for Immediate Collective Action

Key Points Editors‐in‐chief of AGU journals stress urgent need for greening economy Cross‐sector solutions‐based science must supplement basic research AGU is adding solutions‐based community science journal to portfolio

An Introduction to the E3SM Special Collection: Goals, Science Drivers, Development, and Analysis

AbstractSupported by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM) project aims to optimize the use of DOE resources to address the grand challenge of actionable predictions of Earth system variability and change. This requires sustained advancement to (1) integrate model development with leading‐edge computational advances toward ultra‐high‐resolution modeling; (2) represent the coupled human‐Earth system to address energy sector vulnerability to variability and change; and (3) address uncertainty in model simulations and projections. Scientific development of the E3SM modeling system is driven by the simulation requirements in three overarching science areas centering on understanding the Earth's water cycle, biogeochemistry, and cryosphere systems and their future changes. This paper serves as an introduction to the E3SM special collection, which includes 50 papers published in several AGU journals. It provides an overview of the E3SM project, including its goals and science drivers. It also provides a brief history of the development of E3SM version 1 and highlights some key findings from papers included in the special collection.

How Is the Pandemic Affecting AGU Journal Article Submissions?

AGU journal submissions have not seen a significant decrease in the proportion of female corresponding authors.

Introduction to the Special Collection: Magnetism in the Geosciences—Advances and Perspectives

AbstractMagnetic property research in the geosciences has seen an enormous development during the most recent decade. The underlying special collection published in two AGU journals: Journal of Geophysical Research—Solid Earth and Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems is an outcome of the 11th International Conference on Rock Magnetism, held in Utrecht (The Netherlands) in July 2017 and reflects this full breadth. We recognize four groups in which individual contributions are gathered. (1) Recent advances in fundamental rock and mineral magnetic methods, including discussions on how to assess magnetic grain size, which is centrally important to magnetic stability over geologic timescales and high‐fidelity paleomagnetic recording. (2) Geomagnetism with an emphasis on late Pleistocene paleosecular variation and relative paleointensity records, relevant to geomagnetic field models. (3) Reassessments of classic paleomagnetic field tests and examples of tectonic and magnetostratigraphic applications. (4) The merit of magnetic property analysis in solving geoscience problems, both in soft and hard rocks.

Sharing Planetary Science in Plain Language

AbstractIn 2016, JGR: Planets became the first AGU journal to begin accepting plain language summaries as a component of research and review articles. Authors began widely participating in this new approach to sharing planetary science in clear language with growth from 18% to 52% of published articles having a summary from the first to last quarters of 2017. In 2018, JGR: Planets joined several other AGU journals in making a plain language summary an expectation of all papers. Plain language summaries are an opportunity to make the rationale for, relevance of, and results from our work clear to a broad audience including students, science journalists, funders, and colleagues outside our specialty, among others. As adoption of and familiarity with, plain language summaries expands the impact of our work within our community and our society will grow too.

Thank You to Our 2018 Peer Reviewers

AbstractThe process of completing and communicating rigorous, high‐impact science depends heavily on obtaining quality peer review prior to publication. As AGU journals strive continually to publish excellent work, we recognize the demand that this places on reviewers' time, especially as most of us seem to receive ever‐increasing numbers of requests to review manuscripts. JGR‐Earth Surface typically strives to obtain three reviews per manuscript, to best ensure the quality of the science that we publish. We thank the members of the earth‐surface community who volunteered their time to complete these reviews for JGR‐Earth Surface in 2018: a total of 874 reviews provided by 650 scientists. We greatly appreciate your time, your thoughtful and constructive review comments, and especially your dedication to this all‐important part of producing high‐quality science.

Diversifying the Reviewer Pool

After a successful trial to actively encourage authors to recommend diverse lists of reviewers for their papers, a reminder statement about diversity will now be rolled out across AGU journals.

Cassini’s Legacy in Print

With over 750 papers published in AGU journals based on Cassini-Huygens mission data, three editors select some of the most noteworthy.

Annotation Tool Facilitates Peer Review

AGU journals will incorporate open source software to facilitate dialog among reviewers, editors and authors during peer review.

Connecting People and Papers

The ORCID initiative to assign unique identifiers to researchers has had good uptake among authors in AGU journals, giving them additional recognition and credit for their work.

New Style for AGU Journals and Books

A major standardization of reference and grammatical styles will be rolled out across AGU publications from September 2017.

<em>Radio Science</em> and <em>Space Weather</em> Now Available on IEEE <em>Xplore</em>

Two AGU journals are poised to reach a broader audience.