Journal of Environmental Engineering

About Journal of Environmental Engineering

Journal of Environmental Engineering: ASCE's Flagship Journal for Environmental Engineering Science and Practice

The Journal of Environmental Engineering is a monthly journal published by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), the oldest national engineering society in the United States. The Journals World record for this post gives the print ISSN as 0733-9372 and the electronic ISSN as 1943-7870, and names the American Society of Civil Engineers as publisher, with ASCE's address in Reston, Virginia recorded in publisher listings as 1801 Alexander Bell Drive, Reston, VA 20191-4400. Its CODEN, the code used by libraries and abstracting services, is JOEEDU, which also forms part of the digital object identifiers of its articles. The journal's own stated purpose, in the wording reproduced in ASCE's description of the title, is to present broad interdisciplinary information on the practice and status of research in environmental engineering science, systems engineering and sanitation. That combination — practice and research, science and sanitation — is the key to the journal. It is written by and for a profession, not only for a research specialty, and it expects a paper to matter to someone who designs, operates, regulates or pays for environmental infrastructure.

The scope statement continues in detail, and it is long because the field is wide. Papers focus on the design and development of engineering methods, management, governmental policies and societal impacts of wastewater collection and treatment; the fate and transport of contaminants in watersheds, in surface waters, in groundwater, in soil and in the atmosphere; environmental biology, microbiology, chemistry, fluid mechanics and the physical processes that control the natural concentrations and dispersion of wastes in air, water and soil; nonpoint-source pollution in watersheds, streams, groundwater, lakes, estuaries and coastal areas; the treatment, management and control of hazardous wastes; the control and monitoring of air pollution and acid deposition; airshed management; and the design and management of solid waste facilities. The statement closes by saying that a balanced contribution from consultants, practising engineers and researchers is sought, on engineering solutions and on professional obligations and responsibilities. Few journal scope statements anywhere name their intended authorship that explicitly, and authors who ignore it — by submitting work with no conceivable application — are the ones most likely to be disappointed.

Identity at a glance

Full title: Journal of Environmental Engineering. ISO abbreviation: J. Environ. Eng. (N.Y.). CODEN: JOEEDU. Print ISSN: 0733-9372. Electronic ISSN: 1943-7870. Publisher: American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Reston, Virginia, United States. Frequency: monthly, twelve issues a year. Language: English. Discipline: environmental engineering, within civil engineering. Publication platform: ASCE Library. Previous titles: Journal of the Sanitary Engineering Division; then Journal of the Environmental Engineering Division from 1973; current title from 1983. Author charges: ASCE's current page-charge, colour-charge and open-access arrangements for this title are not stated numerically here, because a current official figure could not be verified for this profile; authors should take any charge from ASCE's author information at the time of submission, and should not rely on third-party listings that quote fees without a date.

History: from the Transactions of 1892 to the title of 1983

The journal is described as one of ASCE's flagship journals, and its history explains why. Its origin goes back to the publication of the first volume of the Transactions of the American Society of Civil Engineers in 1892, the society having been founded in 1852. ASCE's publishing developed through society Proceedings that later divided by technical division, so that by the mid-twentieth century each division had its own journal. This journal began publication in 1956 as the Journal of the Sanitary Engineering Division. The word sanitary now sounds dated, but it named a real and urgent discipline: the engineering of water supply, sewerage and waste treatment that had transformed mortality in industrial cities, and that was then being extended to a rapidly suburbanising United States.

Two renamings chart the transformation of that discipline into modern environmental engineering. In 1973 the title became the Journal of the Environmental Engineering Division. Scopus coverage records used by aggregators likewise date the journal's modern run from 1973. In 1983 it acquired its current name, Journal of Environmental Engineering, dropping the division wording as ASCE reorganised its journals as freestanding titles. The timing is not incidental. The United States enacted the Clean Water Act in 1972, the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974 and the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act in 1976, and was building the treatment plants, monitoring regimes and regulatory science those laws required. A journal that had been about sanitation became, in the space of a decade, a journal about contaminants, ecosystems, hazardous waste and public policy — and its contents changed accordingly, from design of conventional treatment works towards fate and transport modelling, trace contaminant chemistry, microbiology and risk.

That history has a practical consequence for anyone searching the literature. Work published before 1983 will not be found under the current title, and citations must be given under the title in force at the time: Journal of the Sanitary Engineering Division for the period from 1956, and Journal of the Environmental Engineering Division for 1973 to 1982, with still earlier material in the society's Transactions and Proceedings. Bibliographic databases that treat the three titles as three unrelated journals fragment the record of a single continuous publication; databases that merge them without noting the changes create citations that cannot be traced. This profile records all three titles precisely so that readers can follow the chain.

Editorship and the society context

Wikipedia's summary of the journal, based on ASCE information, lists Dionysios D. Dionysiou of the University of Cincinnati as editor. Editors of ASCE journals serve defined terms and change, so anyone intending to correspond with the editor, propose a special collection or cite the editorship in a document should verify the current name in the ASCE Library masthead for the journal rather than relying on any secondary summary, including this profile. What does not change is the structure around the editorship: ASCE journals are published by a professional society whose members are the journal's authors, reviewers and readers, and whose technical divisions and institutes shape the subject communities the journal serves. ASCE, headquartered in Reston, Virginia, describes its mission in terms of advancing the science and profession of civil engineering and enhancing human welfare through the activities of its members, and its journals are one of the principal instruments of that mission. For an environmental engineer, publishing in the society's flagship environmental journal is also a professional act, read by peers who may later design to the methods it reports.

Scope in detail

Wastewater collection and treatment. This is the historic core and remains a major part of the journal. Research covers sewer systems and collection networks, including infiltration and inflow into ageing sewers — a problem ASCE itself has highlighted in reporting work published in the journal, in which ten case studies of small communities examined the construction and operation of wastewater infrastructure and used life-cycle assessment, cost data and operational experience to test when mitigating infiltration and inflow reduced environmental impacts and costs. It covers biological treatment, nutrient removal, disinfection, sludge and biosolids handling, resource recovery from wastewater, and the performance of mechanical wastewater resource recovery facilities as against lagoon systems. Papers are expected to report performance in terms an operator or designer can use, with loading rates, effluent quality, energy use and variability, not only removal percentages under laboratory conditions.

Drinking water and water treatment technologies. Treatment research spans coagulation and filtration, membranes, adsorption, advanced oxidation processes, disinfection and disinfection by-products, and the removal of contaminants including metals, pharmaceuticals and other trace organic compounds and pathogens. The journal's breadth means a water treatment paper competes for space with every other branch of the field, so the strongest submissions show why a process matters at the scale and water quality of a real supply, and how it behaves when source water quality changes, rather than presenting a single idealised test water.

Fate and transport of contaminants. The scope names this explicitly across watersheds, surface water, groundwater, soil and the atmosphere. Papers model and measure how contaminants move, transform, sorb, volatilise, degrade and accumulate, and how those processes control exposure. This part of the journal is its most mathematical and most interdisciplinary, drawing on fluid mechanics, environmental chemistry, microbiology and hydrology, and it is where the journal most clearly serves environmental science as well as engineering: a well-validated transport model changes what regulators and consultants can predict about a spill, a leaking site or a diffuse agricultural load.

Nonpoint-source pollution and receiving waters. Pollution that arrives from a landscape rather than a pipe — from watersheds, streams, groundwater, lakes, estuaries and coastal areas — is named as a distinct part of the scope. Such work includes watershed modelling, best management practices, stormwater control, urban runoff quality and the assessment of measures intended to reduce loads. Because nonpoint sources are driven by weather, land use and behaviour, papers here often combine monitoring data with models and must be unusually careful about uncertainty; the journal's readership includes the practitioners who will be held responsible for the outcomes of the measures recommended.

Hazardous waste, solid waste and contaminated sites. The treatment, management and control of hazardous wastes, and the design and management of solid waste facilities, are both in scope. Contributions address landfill design and leachate, waste stabilisation, remediation of contaminated soil and groundwater, and the long-term behaviour of containment systems. Work in this area is judged partly on its treatment of time: a containment or remediation claim that is not accompanied by a discussion of longevity, monitoring and failure modes will not satisfy reviewers in a journal read by engineers who sign off on such facilities.

Air pollution, acid deposition and airshed management. Although the journal is most often thought of as a water journal, air is explicitly within its remit: control and monitoring of air pollution and acid deposition, and airshed management. Historically this reflected the fact that environmental engineering grew out of public health engineering, which dealt with air as well as water, and it continues to give the journal occasional papers on emissions control and atmospheric deposition to watersheds that connect the air and water parts of its scope.

Management, policy, societal impact and professional responsibility. Unusually for an engineering research journal, the scope includes management, governmental policies and societal impacts, and professional obligations and responsibilities, and it seeks a balance of consultants, practising engineers and researchers. Case studies of real systems, evaluations of programmes, studies of infrastructure decision-making and analyses of how regulation changes engineering practice therefore have a home here that they would not have in a purely scientific title. The standard applied is still rigour: a case study must produce knowledge that transfers beyond the single system described, and a policy paper must engage evidence rather than restate a position.

Sustainability, resilience and climate. Contemporary contents extend the traditional scope towards sustainability assessment, life-cycle analysis, resource recovery, energy use in environmental infrastructure, and the adaptation of water and waste systems to a changing climate. Aggregator descriptions of the journal's aims also list climate change mitigation and adaptation, environmental impact assessment and sustainable waste management among its areas. Those are best read as modern expressions of the original remit rather than as new subjects: the journal has always been about the environmental consequences of engineered systems, and climate change alters the design conditions — rainfall intensity, temperature, sea level, demand — on which every other topic in the scope depends.

Indexing and metrics, with attribution

The journal is indexed in Scopus, and its subject categories in SCImago-based summaries are Civil and Structural Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Environmental Science and Environmental Chemistry. One aggregator summary based on SCImago data reports an h-index of 102, an SJR value of 0.498 and a best quartile of Q2, with total citations in the preceding three years of 1,087 and coverage from 1973, while another reports Q2 positions in Civil and Structural Engineering, Environmental Engineering and Environmental Science and Q3 in Environmental Chemistry. A separate metric summary reports an impact factor of 1.810 for 2025, up from 1.690 in 2024, with an SJR of 0.484 for 2025; Wikipedia's older summary reported an impact factor of 1.657 for 2018. These figures are presented here exactly as attributed secondary sources, not as a single authoritative series, because impact factors and SJR values are published for a specific year by a specific provider and change annually. Anyone who needs to cite a metric — for a promotion dossier, a grant report or a journal comparison — should take it from Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports or from SCImago for the year in question and name that source and year.

Two cautions follow. First, environmental engineering is a field in which a large share of the influential literature is published by professional societies and in conference proceedings and standards, so citation indicators systematically understate the practical influence of a society journal such as this one; a method adopted into design practice may change how plants are built while generating fewer citations than a laboratory discovery. Second, quartile labels differ between providers — Web of Science-based summaries have placed the journal in lower quartiles in some categories and years than SCImago-based summaries do — so a bare quartile without its provider, category and year is meaningless and should never be copied from one profile to another.

Who should submit, and what reviewers will look for

The journal fits researchers in environmental and civil engineering departments, scientists in government and industry laboratories, consultants with a study that generalises, and practising engineers with rigorous evaluations of real systems. A strong submission normally has four properties. It addresses a problem that a designer, operator or regulator actually faces. It reports methods completely enough to be reproduced, including the characteristics of the water, waste or site studied, which in environmental engineering are often the difference between a result that transfers and one that does not. It compares its results against the realistic alternative — the conventional process, the existing design method, the current regulatory approach — rather than against a straw comparison. And it states its limits: the range of conditions tested, the scale at which the work was done, and what would need to be shown before the result is used at full scale.

Weaker fits include purely analytical chemistry or microbiology with no engineering implication, environmental monitoring reports with no analysis or general conclusion, regional case descriptions that do not transfer, and modelling studies that are neither calibrated nor validated against observations. ASCE's wider author expectations also apply: manuscripts must be original, must not be under consideration elsewhere, must credit all contributors appropriately, and must present data honestly, and authors should read ASCE's current author information for this journal for formatting, length, figure and supplementary-material requirements and for any charges, all of which are set by the publisher and can change. Because ASCE is a society publisher with a large journals programme, its instructions are detailed and specific, and manuscripts that ignore them are commonly returned for correction before review.

How different readers use the journal

Design engineers and consultants use it for methods and performance data that can be defended to a client or a regulator: treatment performance under realistic conditions, model validation studies, evaluations of infrastructure programmes, and analyses of failure or underperformance. Regulators and utility managers use it for evidence about what interventions achieve, at what cost and with what side effects, including life-cycle and cost consequences that do not appear in a purely technical paper. Researchers use it to place new work in a literature that reaches back to 1956 under earlier titles, and to find the fate-and-transport and process foundations on which newer sustainability and resilience work rests. Students find in it a clearer picture of what environmental engineering is than a textbook alone provides, because its papers show the discipline's characteristic negotiation between laboratory science, field reality, cost and public obligation. Librarians should note that it is a subscription society journal delivered through the ASCE Library, with the back file extending through the predecessor titles, and that holdings statements need to include those earlier titles for the run to appear complete.

Distinguishing this journal from similarly named titles

The title is generic enough to cause real confusion, and three distinctions are essential. First, the Journal of Environmental Engineering and Science is a different journal, published in Canada, with different ISSNs and a different publisher; it is not this ASCE title. Second, Environmental Engineering Science is a separate journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, despite the near-identical wording. Third, Elsevier's Journal of Environmental Chemical Engineering and Springer's and other publishers' various environmental engineering titles share vocabulary but not identity. In every case the reliable test is the combination of publisher and ISSN: ASCE plus print ISSN 0733-9372 and electronic ISSN 1943-7870 identifies this journal and no other. A further trap is the predecessor titles of this journal itself: Journal of the Sanitary Engineering Division and Journal of the Environmental Engineering Division are earlier names of this same publication, not different journals, so they should be treated as title history in a catalogue rather than as separate competing titles, while the similarly named modern journals above are genuinely separate and must not be merged into this record.

There is no structured-field conflict in the Journals World record for this post: the publisher named, the American Society of Civil Engineers, matches the publisher of record in ASCE Library and in indexing sources, and the two ISSNs match the print and electronic ISSNs given in those sources. The only refinement this profile adds is the Reston, Virginia location from publisher listings, the CODEN JOEEDU, and the title history, none of which contradicts the record.

Frequently asked questions

Is the Journal of Environmental Engineering a civil engineering journal or an environmental science journal? It is an engineering journal published by a civil engineering society, whose scope deliberately includes the environmental science — biology, microbiology, chemistry, fluid mechanics — on which environmental engineering depends. Its papers are expected to lead to engineering conclusions.

How long has it been published? In its modern form from 1956 as the Journal of the Sanitary Engineering Division, renamed in 1973 and again in 1983 to its current title, with origins in ASCE's Transactions whose first volume appeared in 1892.

Does it publish practice-oriented papers, or only research? Both. Its scope explicitly seeks a balanced contribution from consultants, practising engineers and researchers, on engineering solutions and on professional obligations and responsibilities, alongside research in environmental engineering science.

Is it open access? Aggregator summaries describe it as not an open-access journal, meaning it is not a fully open title; it is a subscription journal in the ASCE Library. Whether an individual article can be made open under a publisher option, and at what charge, should be confirmed in ASCE's current author information, since no official figure could be verified for this profile.

Where do I check details before submitting or citing? In the ASCE Library page for the journal for current aims, editorial information and author instructions; in the journal's own masthead for the current editor; and in Journal Citation Reports or SCImago for a metric for a specified year.

Summary

The Journal of Environmental Engineering, print ISSN 0733-9372 and electronic ISSN 1943-7870, CODEN JOEEDU, published monthly by the American Society of Civil Engineers in Reston, Virginia, is the flagship environmental title of the United States' oldest national engineering society. Descended from ASCE's Transactions of 1892 and published under its own divisional titles from 1956, it took its present name in 1983 as the profession it serves was being reshaped by modern environmental law. Its scope runs from wastewater collection and treatment, drinking water and hazardous and solid waste, through the fate and transport of contaminants in water, soil and air, to management, policy, societal impact and professional responsibility, and it asks for contributions from consultants and practising engineers as well as researchers. For anyone who needs to know how environmental infrastructure is designed, evaluated and improved, it remains a central source.