Icarus (journal)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Icarus, the scientific journal of planetary science, takes its name from a figure who flew too close to the sun. That choice of name was deliberate. The frontispiece of every single issue carries an extended quotation from the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington, who equated the mythical Icarus's adventurousness with the spirit of scientific inquiry: the investigator who "strains his theories to the breaking-point till the weak joints gape." A journal willing to name itself after a catastrophic fall, and then remind its readers of that in every issue, is making a statement about what science actually requires. What does that philosophy look like in practice? Who shaped this journal over its six decades? And how did a publication founded in 1962 become the flagship outlet of planetary science?

• 2. The Eddington Motto

  ›

  Sir Arthur Eddington's words appear at the front of every issue, not as decoration but as a mission statement. The quotation frames Icarus not as a cautionary tale but as a model. Eddington's investigator pushes ideas until they break, seeking the point of failure as a way of testing limits. This is the epistemology the journal endorses in print. The choice to foreground that quotation in each issue makes it impossible for any reader to ignore the journal's governing philosophy. Science, in this framing, is not cautious accumulation but deliberate overreach. The Eddington passage also connects the journal's name to a long tradition of astronomers who identified with mythological figures straining toward the sky.

• 3. Scope and Coverage

  ›

  Icarus covers an unusually wide scientific range for a single journal. Articles draw on astronomy, geology, meteorology, physics, chemistry, and biology, all focused on a shared object of study: the Solar System or extrasolar systems. That breadth reflects the nature of planetary science itself, which cannot confine itself to a single discipline when the questions involve whether a moon has a subsurface ocean or how a comet's dust behaves in a vacuum. The journal is officially endorsed by the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences, which joined forces with Icarus in 1974, twelve years after the journal's founding.

• 4. Carl Sagan at the Helm

  ›

  Carl Sagan served as editor of Icarus from 1968 to 1979, a stretch of eleven years that coincided with the early space age and some of the most dramatic planetary discoveries in history. Sagan's tenure placed one of the twentieth century's most publicly engaged scientists at the center of the field's primary publication. Before Sagan took over, Albert G. Wilson and Zdeněk Kopal had jointly edited the journal since its founding in 1962. After Sagan stepped down, Joseph A. Burns held the editorship from 1980 to 1997, a reign of seventeen years. Philip D. Nicholson then carried the journal from 1998 to 2018. The current editor, Rosaly Lopes, took over in 2018 and continues in the role today.

• 5. Publishing History

  ›

  Academic Press was the journal's original owner and publisher from its founding in 1962. In 2000, Elsevier purchased Academic Press, bringing Icarus under one of the world's largest scientific publishing houses. That transition placed the journal within a corporate infrastructure with global distribution reach. The journal is indexed by a wide array of abstracting services, including the Science Citation Index, GeoRef, Chemical Abstracts Service, and the International Aerospace Abstracts, among others. Inclusion in the Science Citation Index in particular tracks the journal's influence across the scientific literature, since that index measures how often other researchers cite a given paper.