Disaster Advances

About Disaster Advances

Disaster Advances — Journal Profile

Disaster Advances is an Indian scholarly journal devoted to disaster science in the broadest sense: natural and human-made disasters, the earth, atmospheric, ocean and geological sciences that explain them, and the environmental and engineering research that helps societies anticipate and withstand them. It is published from Indore, India, with papers administered through the World Researchers Associations portal, and it has appeared monthly — twelve issues a year — building a large archive since the late 2000s. Its two ISSNs are 0974-262X (print) and 2278-4543 (online).

This profile sets out, in one place, the journal's identity and history, its unusually wide subject scope as the journal itself states it, its editorial and article types, the citation metrics reported by SCImago-based and OpenAlex sources (each figure attributed to its source), its indexing and directory position, what could and could not be verified about fees and licensing, and practical guidance for authors deciding whether to submit.

At a Glance

History and Identity

Disaster Advances belongs to the generation of Indian research journals that grew up alongside the country's expanding university and doctoral system in the late 2000s. The Disaster Research Journals List compiled in 2023 records the journal as starting in 2008, from India, publishing twelve times a year, while SCImago-derived listings give its coverage as beginning in 2009 — the profile therefore describes it as launched in 2008 with indexed coverage from 2009, rather than pretending the two records say the same thing. Its name is deliberately two-part: "Disaster" names the problem field, and "Advances" signals its appetite for new findings across the whole disaster cycle — hazard science, vulnerability, forecasting, impact, response and recovery — rather than for a single discipline's slice of it.

The journal's public footprint reflects that breadth. Its received-papers pages on the World Researchers Associations portal list a continuous flow of submitted manuscripts from authors in India and abroad, on topics from precipitation distribution and groundwater quality to school disaster-management planning, flood forecasting with cellular models and virtual-reality tsunami drills. Individual articles carry DOIs under the prefix 10.25303 (for example, a 2023 article on bioshields against coastal erosion is registered as doi:10.25303/1610da063066), which gives the archive stable, citable identifiers volume by volume — the journal reached Volume 16 in 2023 and continues to the present.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The journal's own invitation to authors, reproduced in the journal summaries built from its pages, asks for research papers, short communications and review papers in any field related to:

• Natural disasters;
• Man-made disasters;
• Atmospheric sciences;
• Earth sciences;
• Ocean and marine sciences;
• Geological sciences;
• Meteorological sciences;
• Environmental sciences, climate change and global warming;
• Mining engineering.

OpenAlex's topic classification of the journal's actual published content confirms that this stated scope is what the journal really prints. Its most frequent OpenAlex topics are disaster management and resilience; flood risk assessment and management; landslides and related hazards; earthquake and disaster impact studies; and geotechnical engineering and analysis. SCImago classifies the journal across earth and planetary sciences, engineering and environmental science. In practice, then, a submission fits Disaster Advances if it advances knowledge about a hazard, a vulnerable system, a forecasting or mitigation method, or the environmental processes behind disasters — whether the author's home discipline is geology, civil engineering, meteorology, geography, environmental chemistry or public administration. Purely clinical, purely commercial or purely theoretical work with no disaster connection falls outside the journal's stated remit.

The monthly frequency and the breadth of scope together produce a high-volume journal: OpenAlex's ISSN-resolved record counted 650 works for the title at checking time, with recent annual counts in that record running at roughly seventy to one hundred and thirty works a year — a scale that authors should weigh when thinking about visibility: the journal offers a large, thematically concentrated readership community rather than a small, tightly curated one.

Editorial Model and Article Types

The journal publishes three article types: full research papers, short communications for concise findings, and review papers that synthesise a topic. That mixture suits disaster science, where a short, fast communication about a specific event — an earthquake sequence, a flood, a landslide, an industrial accident — can be as valuable as a long study, and where reviews that consolidate regional hazard knowledge are widely read. Submissions are handled through the journal's pages on the World Researchers Associations portal, where the association also maintains the journal's manuscript records; the journal's editor has historically been associated with the shankargargh.org site that OpenAlex records as the journal's homepage, and authors should use the contact route shown on the current portal pages for all correspondence, since web homes for this journal have changed over its life.

On peer review, the journal presents itself as a refereed scholarly journal and its content is carried by the standard bibliographic databases, but the detailed mechanics of its review process — the number of referees per paper, average decision times, acceptance rate — could not be verified from publicly fetched sources at checking time and are therefore stated here as not publicly disclosed rather than guessed. Authors for whom a documented double-blind process or a guaranteed decision window is an institutional requirement should write to the editorial office and obtain that confirmation in writing before submitting.

Metrics — by Source

The two families of numbers measure different corpora and should not be averaged or merged. The SCImago h-index of 22 rests on the Scopus corpus; OpenAlex's h-index of 14 rests on its own, differently bounded record of the same title. The trend data are nonetheless useful: SCImago-derived summaries show the journal's SJR holding roughly steady in the 0.14–0.19 band for a decade and its h-index climbing from 16 in 2020 to 22 by 2024–2025, while the impact-factor series reproduced by SciJournal rises from around 0.30 at the start of the decade to 0.670 in 2025. Read together, they describe a stable, mid-volume specialist journal with slowly growing citation weight in the earth-science and disaster community — not a high-impact generalist title, and authors should calibrate expectations accordingly.

Indexing and Directory Position

The journal's presence in Scopus-derived services is long-standing: SCImago carries it with coverage from 2009 and classifies it in earth and planetary sciences, engineering and environmental science. It appears in curated field bibliographies — notably the Disaster Research Journals List 2023, which catalogues disaster journals indexed in Web of Science and/or Scopus and records Disaster Advances with its online ISSN 2278-4543, a 2008 start and monthly periodicity. OpenAlex resolves both of its ISSNs to a single source record with a substantial works count, which aids discoverability in open bibliometric tools.

One directory point must be stated plainly: a foreground search of the DOAJ search API for both ISSN 0974-262X and ISSN 2278-4543 returned no listing at the time this profile was checked. That does not make the journal subscription-only by definition — its articles are readable through its portal — but authors whose funders or institutions specifically require a DOAJ-listed venue should treat Disaster Advances as not DOAJ-listed on current evidence and verify again at submission time, because directory rosters change.

Fees, Licensing and Access — What Could Be Verified

The journal's public pages, as fetched for this profile, do not publish a clear, itemised statement of submission or publication charges, and no verified licence statement for individual articles could be confirmed from a fetched source; both points are therefore recorded here as could not be verified, and neither should be assumed in either direction. The prudent author workflow is: read the current instructions on the official portal at submission time; if any payment is requested at any stage, ask for the amount, the basis and the payee in writing before paying; and confirm the copyright and reuse terms that will apply to the published article. This caution is good practice with any journal whose fee policy is not stated on a page that can be cited, and it costs nothing to follow.

How to Submit — Practical Guidance

• Choose the article type honestly: full paper for complete studies, short communication for single findings or event reports, review only where the synthesis adds something the literature lacks.
• Anchor the paper in the journal's scope list: say explicitly, early in the introduction, which of the journal's stated fields the work belongs to and what it advances — hazard understanding, forecasting, mitigation, impact assessment or recovery.
• Use the regional strength of the journal: case studies from India, South and South-East Asia and other hazard-exposed regions are core content here, and local data with clear methods travel well with this readership.
• Include the standard apparatus of disaster-science reporting: study-area description, data sources and periods, hazard or event parameters, and limitations; the journal's typical papers are empirical and its readers expect reproducible detail.
• Register nothing and pay nothing except as the current official instructions direct; retain copies of all correspondence and of the submitted manuscript version.
• Expect a monthly-issue production rhythm: twelve issues a year means accepted papers can be placed in an issue without the long queues of an annual or quarterly title, though no specific turnaround figure is promised or verified here.

Who Should Publish Here — and Who Should Look Elsewhere

Disaster Advances suits researchers whose work is applied, regional and hazard-focused: geologists, geographers, civil and mining engineers, meteorologists, environmental scientists and disaster-management specialists, especially doctoral researchers and early-career authors building a publication record in Scopus-covered venues. It is a weaker choice for work aimed at the very top of the citation hierarchy in hazards research, for clinical disaster medicine, or for authors whose evaluation rules require DOAJ listing or a Journal Impact Factor above the levels reported in the metrics table. Knowing which game a journal is playing is not a criticism of it; this journal plays the high-volume, broad-scope, practitioner-adjacent game consistently, and papers written for that audience do well in it.

Similar and Alternative Journals

Comparable venues authors commonly weigh alongside Disaster Advances include: Natural Hazards (Springer), the field's long-established hazards title; International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction (Elsevier), focused on risk-reduction policy and practice; Disaster Prevention and Management (Emerald), with a management and social-science emphasis; Journal of Disaster Research (Fuji Technology Press), an open-access Japanese title with a broad hazards remit; the Australasian Journal of Disaster and Trauma Studies; and the Australian Journal of Emergency Management for practice-oriented work. Within India, geoscientific authors also consider the Geological Society of India and earth-system titles. Disaster Advances differs from most of these in its monthly frequency, its inclusion of mining engineering and earth sciences alongside disaster management, and its Indian editorial base.

What Published Papers in This Journal Look Like

The manuscript listings and published citations give a clear picture of the journal's working style. Titles are descriptive and place-specific: a study on the inequitable distribution of precipitation over Telangana state; a school disaster-management plan case study from Bilaspur district in Himachal Pradesh; a vulnerability analysis of fire-disaster evacuation in old Thanjavur town using the space-syntax method; a forecast of land-cover change as a flood-prevention strategy in an Indonesian watershed; an awareness study using virtual-reality tsunami drills. Several features recur. First, geography is usually named in the title — this is a journal whose readers search by hazard and by place. Second, methods are pragmatic and often computational: clustering algorithms for provincial disaster vulnerability, cellular-automata land-cover models, groundwater physicochemical assessment, GIS-flavoured spatial analysis. Third, the author base is heavily doctoral and early-career, from Indian universities and polytechnics and from partner countries across Asia, which makes the journal a genuine community venue for applied disaster research rather than a showcase for a small circle of laboratories.

For an author drafting a submission, the lesson is concrete: write the paper this journal actually prints. That means a title that names the hazard and the place, an abstract that reports data and results rather than aspirations, maps and parameter tables where the work is spatial, and a discussion that converts findings into mitigation or preparedness implications. Papers that read as generic environmental essays, without a defined hazard, dataset or study area, are the ones most likely to struggle here, because they give the editors nothing to match against the journal's stated fields.

The Journal in Its Research Community

Disaster Advances sits in the practical middle of the disaster-journal ecosystem catalogued by the Disaster Research Journals List 2023, which placed it among fifty-six disaster journals indexed in Web of Science and/or Scopus. That list is a useful map of the neighbourhood: at one end sit high-threshold titles in emergency medicine and risk policy; at the other, regional and society journals serving national research communities. Disaster Advances' niche on that map is breadth plus volume — it is one of the few titles in the catalogue publishing twelve times a year, and one of the few whose remit runs from seismology and mining engineering through to school preparedness planning. For librarians and evaluators, the corollary is that journal-level averages hide wide internal variation: the standing of any individual article depends on its own citations and use, and the journal's rising h-index trend in the SCImago series (16 in 2020 to 22 in 2024-2025) suggests a slowly strengthening core of cited work inside the large archive.

Readers use the journal accordingly: as a source of regional case material — Indian and Asian hazard studies in particular — that is thinly covered by the North-American and European flagship titles, and as a record of practice (district-level plans, local vulnerability studies) that sits below the threshold of the international generalist journals but is exactly what district administrators, state disaster-management authorities and doctoral researchers in the region need to find each other's work.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the journal's ISSNs? Print 0974-262X and online 2278-4543; both resolve to the same source record in OpenAlex.

How often does it publish? Monthly — twelve issues a year, as recorded in the Disaster Research Journals List 2023.

When did it start? The DRJ List records 2008; SCImago-derived coverage begins in 2009.

What does it publish? Research papers, short communications and reviews on natural and man-made disasters, atmospheric, earth, ocean, geological and meteorological sciences, environmental science and climate change, and mining engineering.

What is its h-index? 22 on SCImago's Scopus-based count; 14 in OpenAlex's record. The two corpora differ, so both are reported with their sources.

Is it in DOAJ? No listing was found in a foreground DOAJ API search for either ISSN at checking time.

Does it charge authors? No verified fee statement could be confirmed from fetched public pages; ask the editorial office in writing before submitting if this matters to you.

Do its articles have DOIs? Yes — published articles carry DOIs under the prefix 10.25303.

Sources and Verification

Compiled from: the live Journals World record (identity and ISSNs anchored to the stored record); the World Researchers Associations portal pages for the journal (manuscript listings and journal administration); the Disaster Research Journals List 2023 (start year, frequency, online ISSN, field classification); SCImago data as reproduced in published journal summaries (h-index, SJR series); SciJournal's year-by-year impact-factor table; the OpenAlex source record resolved through its ISSN endpoint for both ISSNs (S73098488: works, citations, topics, annual counts); a foreground DOAJ API search for both ISSNs (no listing returned); and published article citations carrying the journal's DOI prefix. Details that no fetched source could verify — fee levels, licence terms, review mechanics, acceptance rates — are flagged in the text as not publicly disclosed or could not be verified, and nothing in this profile has been invented to fill those gaps.