Arid Land Geography (ALG), founded in 1978, is a bimonthly academic Chinese journal (ISSN 1000-6060, CN 65-1103/X) with 12 issues per year. This journal is superintended by Chinese Academy of Sciences, jointly sponsored by Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography, Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Geographical Society of China, and published by Science Press.

1.      Aims and Scope

The main academic contents of ALG include the new theories, technologies, methods and achievements in geography of the arid region, particularly in the fields of physical geography, human geography, regional geography, natural resource exploitation and utilization, environment evolution, disaster prevention and control meteorology and climatology in arid area. The aim of the journal is to promote academic exchange at home and aboard and to set up the forum for prospering and developing geography of arid land.

2.      ALG has a double-blind peer-review process

After initial review by editor and editor-in-chief, manuscripts with high quality and interesting scientific questions are sent out for peer review, usually to at least two reviewers. The editors select reviewers from an electronic database of approximately 3000 reviewers. The reviewer database is supplemented, as necessary, by author recommending or by a literature search. Authors are also encouraged to suggest preferred and non-preferred reviewers during the submission process. Manuscripts will not send to the reviewers who have the same institutional affiliation or relationships with the manuscripts’ authors. In addition, reviewers are encouraged to disclose any potential conflicts of interest before reviewing a manuscript. The authors need to pay 200 yuan for the peer-review process of their manuscript.

When peer reviews have been completed, the editors make one of the decisions listed as below.

Provisional accept. Almost all accepted manuscripts require some editorial and/or statistical revisions prior to publication. Specific changes to the manuscript are requested and needed. Revisions to provisionally accepted manuscript should be uploaded as soon as possible, ideally within one week (no more than one month) after the final decision notification was sent to the authors. In addition, the authors need to pay a certain printing fee for the accepted manuscript.

Revise and resubmit. Additional editorial and/or statistical revisions are required prior to publication. The authors are invited to revise the manuscript to address the reviewers' and editors' comments. Specific changes to the manuscript are requested and needed. The manuscript must be re-reviewed once again for further consideration.

Reject. Manuscripts that are not appropriate for publication in ALG will receive a reject decision. Occasionally, the editors will take the extra step that recommend the authors to submit the manuscript to other suitable journals that are more closely aligned with the topic addressed in the manuscript.

3.      Open Access

Every peer-reviewed research article appearing in this journal will be published open access on the official website of this journal and the CQVIP database. This means that the article is universally and freely accessible via the internet in perpetuity, in an easily readable format immediately after publication.

A CC user license manages the reuse of the article. All articles will be published under the following license:

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND)

For non-commercial purposes, lets others distribute and copy the article, and to include in a collective work (such as an anthology), as long as they credit the author(s) and provided they do not alter or modify the article.

4.      Service Object

The readers of this journal are scientific and educational workers, science and technology management personnel, graduate students and university students in the fields of physical geography, human geography, regional geography, natural resource exploitation and utilization, environment evolution, disaster prevention, and control meteorology and climatology in arid area.

5.      Development Process

ALG was initially published in 1978 under the name of Xinjiang Geography and its publication was irregular. It became a quarterly in 1982 and adopted the present name in 1985.

It has been chosen by Scopus Database, Chinese Science Citation Database, Chinese Science and Technology Abstracts (CSTA) Database (English Edition), Chinese Journal Database, China Journal Network as core information source magazine. It also entered the list of foreign database such as CAB, AGRIS, AGECONCO, PLANT GENE, CAB HEALTH, GeoRef as a citation journal.

It also won many honors, such as:

In 2000-2001, won the Second Prize of Technical Journal in Xinjiang.

In 2002-2003, won the One Prize of Technical Journal in Xinjiang.

In 2004, won the National Excellent Geographical Journal.

In 2005, won the 'Xinjiang Journal Award'.

In 2004-2005, won the One Prize of Technical Journal in Xinjiang.

In 2006-2007, won the One Prize of Technical Journal in Xinjiang.

In 2008, won the 'Xinjiang Journal Award'.