With regard to global warming in Climatic Change, the issue
of global warming has dramatically increased its scientific and policy
prominence in the ‘90s because of the international political
negotiations to fashion a climate protocol treaty. This objective is
necessarily controversial, whi
ch
generates even further interest. Moreover, climate change, and
especially climate policy, involves the integration of knowledge from
many disciplines across the physical, biological, and social sciences.
Climatic Change was the first—and for a decade or so, the
only—journal that published high-quality, peer-reviewed
interdisciplinary papers on any aspect of climate change. Given the
reputation of the journal for maintaining high-quality standards,
academics were naturally attracted since their reputations and rewards
depend upon publications in well-respected, peer-reviewed journals.
When the opportunity arose, we were there, and thus the citation rate
ISI® has documented is not hard to explain.
One thing that is a little less obvious, and for which you need to
talk to the readers and authors of Climatic Change to discover,
is that the editorial effort that Katarina [Kivel, Assistant Editor of
Climatic Change] and I put into the journal recognizes the
differences between disciplinary and interdisciplinary quality (see Editorial
Policy 1998). Authors of truly interdisciplinary papers get
frustrated when their submissions to largely disciplinary journals
have a rough time in peer-review because traditionally those journals
only value originality of the disciplinary material, whereas Climatic
Change stresses originality of the combination of material from
multiple disciplines to address a real world problem like global
warming. Thus, the editorial style of Climatic Change is much
more consistent with the intellectual nature of scholarship on
broad-based global warming issues than most traditional journals. I
think that experience and the reputation of our editorial style
encourages submissions to Climatic Change in disproportion to
its modest circulation.
Climatic Change
Dr. Stephen H. Schneider, Editor
Kluwer Academic Publishers
n
a recent Special Topics analysis of journals publishing papers
on global warming in the past decade, Climatic Change
ranks among the top five by total citations. Stephen H.
Schneider, editor of Climatic Change, offers here a
brief commentary on this journal’s standings in global
warming research, and provides a copy of the journal’s
editorial policy to illustrate his points. In addition to his
responsibilities for Climatic Change, Dr. Schneider is
Professor of Biological Sciences and Senior Fellow of the
Institute for International Studies at Stanford University.