GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS

Evaluation of journals in the field of biology primarily focuses on impact factor, also known as the so-called "several points" journal. However, the evaluation of geoscience journals is much more complex, and I myself have not figured out how this is caused. Excluding comprehensive journals such as NSP, NC, and SA, there are several professional geoscience journals, including NG, Geology, EPSL, GRL, GCA, and JGR. Except for NG, it seems that the impact factors are not very high, around 3-5. On the other hand, several water journals dominated by easily inflated geochemical research have high impact factors, ranging from 7-9. This phenomenon also leads to people subconsciously no longer considering impact factors when evaluating journals, which is clearly different from the field of biology.

Low-level water journals mainly refer to the routinization, standardization, and industrialization of experiments, resulting in very short work cycles and the production of a large number of articles in a short period of time. There are countless branches within the field itself that can be expanded (such as various elements and research areas), which leads to increasing entropy within the field. Articles also reference each other, even if there is little or no progress, but it is indeed a prosperous scene. In this case, the field appears to be more active and articles in this field tend to have higher citations. However, can these factors alone boost the impact factor of a journal? I don't think so. The influence of the journal operator and some advanced operations are not easily replicable.

From the positioning of AGU's journals, GRL should be considered the flagship journal of AGU. I have published articles in both GRL and JGR, and I feel that GRL is generally positioned higher than JGR, similar to how Geology is positioned compared to GSA Bulletin. The difference is that GRL covers a wide range of disciplines and has a higher publication volume, so the evaluation of different disciplines may not be consistent. For some disciplines, GRL may be equivalent to the level of Geology or EPSL; for other disciplines, it may be weaker than these two and similar to JGR overall. Overall, I personally think GRL is slightly inferior to Geology and EPSL. If I had to choose between Geology and GRL, I believe most people would prefer to have an article published in Geology.

This is also a matter of AGU's journal strategy. With so many high-quality journals and such a large publication volume every year, it is not easy to maintain a high level of quality. Therefore, AGU's influence is indeed undeniable, surpassing GSA. However, because of the large publication volume, it is difficult to maintain top-notch articles in flagship journals. In general, I believe that Geology is overall better than GRL without question, but there is a significant difference in the quality of different series of JGR. In the field of geology and geophysics, Solid Earth is clearly better than GSA Bulletin.