Ambio

• 1. Introduction

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  Ambio: A Journal of Environment and Society has been asking hard questions about the human relationship with the natural world since 1972. Published monthly on behalf of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, it sits at a crossroads where ecology meets economics, where geology meets geography, and where the physical sciences meet the study of human communities. What makes a scientific journal persist for more than five decades? And what does it take to rank among the most cited publications in environmental research? Those are the threads this documentary follows.

• 2. Scope and Coverage

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  Bo Söderström, the journal's editor-in-chief at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, oversees a publication whose reach is deliberately wide. Ambio draws from ecology, environmental economics, geology, geochemistry, and geophysics. It also covers physical geography, human geography, paleontology, hydrology, water resources, oceanography, Earth sciences, and meteorology. That breadth reflects a governing belief: that environmental problems do not respect the boundaries between academic disciplines. A question about water resources cannot be answered without hydrology and economics in the same room. A question about land use pulls in human geography and ecology at once. The journal was built on the premise that the human environment is a single interconnected subject, even when the researchers studying it come from very different fields.

• 3. Standing in the Field

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  In the Journal Citation Reports for 2021, Ambio carried an impact factor of 6.943. That figure placed it 18th out of 54 journals in the category of Environmental Engineering, and 56th out of 279 journals in the category of Environmental Sciences. Both rankings put the journal comfortably in the upper tier of its peer group. An impact factor measures how often other researchers cite a journal's articles in their own work, so a score near 7 reflects genuine influence on the literature. Ambio's position inside the top quarter of Environmental Sciences journals, a category with nearly 280 entries, points to a readership that extends well beyond the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and into research communities around the world.