Advances in Space Research

• 1. Introduction

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  Advances in Space Research launched in 1981 as the official journal of the Committee on Space Research, and it has spent more than four decades sitting at the crossroads of nearly every discipline that touches outer space. That is not a small promise. Space research, as this journal defines it, reaches far beyond rockets and satellites. It pulls in meteorology, climate science, materials science, the life sciences, and the fundamental laws of physics. What kind of publication can credibly hold all of that together? And who decides what counts as space research in the first place?

• 2. A Journal Without Walls

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  Thomas Schildknecht at the University of Bern and Peggy Ann Shea at the Air Force Research Laboratory share the role of editors-in-chief, an arrangement that pairs academic and military scientific institutions at the top of the masthead. The breadth of the journal's scope follows from its founding body. The Committee on Space Research was built to coordinate space science across nations, and the journal reflects that ambition by refusing to fence off one discipline from another. Studies of the Earth's surface sit alongside astrophysics. Planetary meteorologies and planetary climates earn their own dedicated coverage. Earth-based astronomical observations appear here too, even when the telescope never left the ground.

• 3. Debris, Weather, and the Living World

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  Space debris is one of the less glamorous corners of spaceflight, yet Advances in Space Research treats it as a first-class research topic. The journal also covers space weather, the storms of charged particles that stream from the sun and can disrupt satellites and power grids alike. Life sciences research rounds out the picture. How living organisms respond to the space environment, from radiation exposure to microgravity, falls squarely within the journal's remit. The reach of the publication extends from the surface of the Earth, through the atmosphere, past the moon, and out toward the planets.

• 4. How the Field Finds the Journal

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  A journal's influence depends partly on how easily other researchers can find and cite its work. Advances in Space Research is abstracted and indexed in a wide array of databases: Chemical Abstracts, Current Contents/Physics, Current Contents/Chemistry and Earth Science, Geographical Abstracts, Geological Abstracts, Inspec, Index to Scientific and Technical Proceedings, Meteorological and Geoastrophysical Abstracts, the Science Citation Index, and Scopus. That list spans chemistry, geoscience, physics, and engineering, which mirrors the journal's own disciplinary range. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the publication carried a 2024 impact factor of 2.8, a measure of how frequently its articles are cited in a given year relative to the number of articles it publishes. Elsevier, which has published the journal since its founding, releases new issues on a semi-monthly schedule, meaning roughly twenty-four issues reach readers each year.