About Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography

Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography

Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography (often shortened to LNGC) is a book series published by Springer — listed in the Journals World record under Springer Berlin, Germany — and not a journal. That distinction shapes everything else in this profile. The series has no issues, no article submission portal of its own and no editor-in-chief deciding on individual manuscripts in the journal sense. Instead it publishes edited volumes: monographs, conference proceedings volumes and collections of selected papers, each with its own editors, its own ISBN and its own DOI, gathered under one series title and one pair of ISSNs. Springer records the series ISSN as 1863-2246 and the electronic ISSN as 1863-2351, and the series is catalogued by Springer as series 7418.

The field it serves is geographic information science and cartography in the broad sense: how spatial data are captured, modelled, analysed, visualised and communicated, and how maps and geographic information systems are designed and used. Its volumes sit in Springer's Earth and environmental science programme and are sold to libraries as part of that collection, which is why a typical reader meets an LNGC chapter through a university library subscription on SpringerLink rather than through a journal homepage.

What Kind of Series Is This?

Springer's "Lecture Notes" families are best understood as branded shelves. Each shelf has a defined subject territory, a small group of series editors who guard its coherence, and a production and distribution system that gives every volume the same bibliographic apparatus: series title page, ISSN, ISBN for the individual book, DOIs at chapter level and indexing in Springer's own platform. Within that frame the contents vary widely. One LNGC volume may be the refereed proceedings of a conference; the next may be a research monograph by a single author team; a third may be a state-of-the-art collection commissioned around a theme such as digital terrain analysis, location-based services or geographic information for risk and crisis management.

For citation and evaluation purposes this means the unit of publication is the chapter inside a named volume, and the volume's own title and editors are as much a part of the reference as the series name. Two chapters both described simply as "in Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography" can come from volumes of very different origin and selectivity — one from a competitive conference's best papers, another from an invited collection — so a careful reader always asks which volume a chapter belongs to.

Scope: Geoinformation, Cartography and Their Neighbours

The series territory can be read from the volumes themselves. Recurring themes include geographic information science theory, spatial data handling and spatial information theory; advances in GIScience, including the selected papers of the AGILE conferences on geographic information science; cartographic design, visualisation and the theory of maps, including planetary cartography and mapping of other worlds; location-based services and telecartography; digital terrain modelling and terrain analysis; information fusion combined with geographic information systems, particularly for maritime and environmental applications; spatial data infrastructures and the European information society; geographic hypermedia and web mapping; and applied volumes on GIS for health, the environment, and risk and crisis management.

Several features of that list are worth noting. First, the series is methodologically plural: it publishes formal work on spatial reasoning and data models alongside software-oriented and application work. Second, it is strongly European in its institutional roots — the AGILE association of geographic information laboratories in Europe recurs throughout its history, and many volumes originate in European conferences and workshops — while remaining international in authorship. Third, its centre of gravity has moved with the field: early volumes are dominated by GISystems and cartographic production, later ones by volunteered and user-generated geographic information, sensor and real-time data, semantics and linked spatial data, and the analysis of movement and events.

A Short History Told Through Its Volumes

The series took shape in the mid-2000s, as Springer consolidated a number of geoinformation book projects into a single numbered series, and its coverage in Scopus-derived listings begins in 2006. Early volumes include Location Based Services and TeleCartography (2007), Digital Terrain Modelling (2007), GIS for Health and the Environment (2007) and the proceedings of the third international workshop on information fusion and geographical information systems held in St Petersburg in 2007. The AGILE connection quickly became a backbone: the proceedings and selected papers of successive AGILE conferences appeared in the series, among them the volumes from Aalborg (2007), Girona (2008), Hannover (2009, as Advances in GIScience) and Leuven (2013, as Geographic Information Science at the Heart of Europe), with the twentieth and twenty-first AGILE conferences represented by volumes published in 2017 and 2018.

Other long-running strands are visible too. The information fusion and geographic information systems workshop series returned repeatedly, including a volume subtitled Towards the Digital Ocean. The spatial data handling symposia contributed volumes such as Headway in Spatial Data Handling (2008) and Advances in Spatial Data Handling and GIS. Thematic collections mark the field's turning points: Geographic Hypermedia captured the convergence of geographic information science with web hypermedia; Geographic Information and Cartography for Risk and Crisis Management addressed early warning and disaster response; and Planetary Cartography and GIS (2019), edited by Henrik Hargitai of NASA Ames Research Center, extended the series' cartographic concerns to geological and topographic mapping of other planets, with chapters by authors who had produced maps or GIS products for NASA, the USGS, DLR and ESA. Bibliometric listings show a steady output of roughly thirty to forty documents a year across the 2010s, which for an edited-volume series corresponds to a small number of substantial books annually.

Series Editors and Volume Editors

Series volumes print four series editors: William Cartwright, Georg Gartner, Liqiu Meng and Michael P. Peterson — names associated respectively with cartography and geographic visualisation in Australia, cartography at TU Wien, cartography at the Technical University of Munich, and web mapping at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Their role is the series-level one: assessing whether a proposed volume belongs in the series, maintaining its academic standing and liaising with Springer's editorial office. The scholarly content of each book, by contrast, is the responsibility of its volume editors, who are named on the cover and in the bibliographic record: conference programme chairs for proceedings volumes, or the scholars who conceived and assembled a thematic collection. Anyone proposing a volume, or evaluating one, should therefore distinguish the two levels and address the right one.

How a Volume Gets Into the Series

There is no open call for individual papers for LNGC, and unsolicited single chapters have no route in. Three routes account for almost all volumes. The first is the conference route: organisers of an established conference or workshop in the series' territory agree with Springer that the proceedings, or a selection of the best papers, will appear as an LNGC volume, and authors then submit to the conference under its own review process, with selected papers typically revised and extended for the book. The second is the edited-collection route: prospective volume editors submit a book proposal to Springer — rationale, contents, contributor list, market and timetable — which is reviewed externally and considered alongside the series editors' advice; chapters are then commissioned and refereed under the volume editors' direction. The third is the monograph route, rarer in this series, where a single-author or co-authored research book is proposed in the same way.

Production follows Springer's standard book workflow: manuscripts prepared in the publisher's template, editorial checks, typesetting, proof correction, and simultaneous release in print and as an electronic book on SpringerLink, with chapters individually downloadable and citable by DOI. Authors normally receive no payment; the economics are those of scholarly book publishing, in which the primary returns are dissemination through library collections and the permanence of a book record. Fees and open-access arrangements for individual volumes are matters for the proposal contract, and no general series-level charge is published, so that point is recorded here as not publicly disclosed at series level.

Who Reads It, and How Chapters Are Found

The readership is the research community in geographic information science, cartography, geodesy, remote sensing and spatial planning, together with advanced students — many volumes are explicitly pitched as references that gather methods otherwise shared only informally. Planetary Cartography and GIS, for example, is described by its publisher as a resource for planetary scientists whose work depends on mapping and for students of astrogeology, and Springer reports tens of thousands of accesses for that volume alone. Chapters are found through SpringerLink search, through Google Scholar, and through the citation databases that index the series; the series' presence in Scopus-derived listings is what allows its chapters to appear in author and institution profiles there.

How to Read the Metrics for LNGC

The Journals World record carries an h-index of 48, an SJR of 0.250 and a Q3 position for this series. Readers comparing sources will find different figures elsewhere: a later SCImago-based listing gives a lower SJR and a best quartile of Q4 in some categories, with an h-index of 47. These are not contradictions so much as different years, different category sets and different counting dates applied to a book series whose citation profile is inherently uneven. The safe practice is to quote the figure, its year and its source together, and never to treat a book series' quartile as if it were a journal impact factor — the series has no Journal Impact Factor, because it is not a journal.

Three cautions apply whenever these numbers are quoted. First, metrics are year-specific snapshots: an SJR, h-index or quartile taken from one edition of a ranking cannot be carried forward unchanged to another year, because the underlying citation window, the set of competing titles and the category assignments all move. Second, metrics for proceedings and book series behave differently from metrics for journals. A journal publishes a steady flow of articles that cite and are cited in predictable patterns, whereas a conference or an edited-volume series publishes in bursts tied to events and editorial projects, so year-to-year swings are normal and carry less signal. Third, a quartile is a position inside a particular subject category, not a universal grade: the same title can sit in different quartiles in different categories in the same year.

For an author deciding where to place a manuscript, the practical questions are therefore more specific than any single number. Is the venue indexed in the databases your institution actually checks, such as Scopus or the Web of Science Conference Proceedings Citation Index for conference work? Do researchers in your subfield read and cite it? Does its review process give you useful feedback within a timeframe that fits your funding, graduation or promotion schedule? And does the work you have genuinely fit the stated scope, rather than merely touching one of its keywords? A well-matched paper in a modest venue normally travels further than a poorly matched paper submitted hopefully to a famous one.

Indexing and Discoverability

Discoverability for a venue of this kind rests on several distinct layers, and it is worth separating them because they are often confused. The first layer is the publisher's own platform, where the version of record sits with its DOI, abstract and reference list. The second layer is the large abstract and citation databases, principally Scopus and Web of Science, which determine whether a publication counts in most institutional evaluations. The third layer is the open scholarly web: Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, DBLP for computing topics and general search engines, which is where most readers in practice first encounter a paper. A venue can be strong on one layer and weak on another, so authors should check the specific layer that matters for their purpose, on the publisher or database site itself, close to the time of submission, because indexing agreements change.

Where this profile states an indexing relationship it does so in the terms the organiser or publisher uses, and where a current status could not be confirmed from an official source it says so plainly rather than repeating an inherited claim. That restraint is deliberate. Indexing is one of the most frequently overstated facts in academic publishing, and the cost of discovering a gap falls on the author, not on the directory that repeated the claim.

Costs, Rights and Open Access

Publication economics differ sharply between the four kinds of venue covered in this batch, and the details matter. Journal articles may carry article processing charges; conference papers usually sit behind a registration fee rather than a per-paper charge, and attendance, travel and visa costs can exceed the fee itself; book-series chapters are normally sold as part of a priced volume, with open access available only where a specific funding arrangement or publisher programme covers it. Where a fee, charge or open-access route for Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography is not published on an official page consulted for this profile, it is recorded here as not publicly disclosed, and intending authors should ask the organiser or publisher directly and keep the answer in writing.

Copyright practice follows the same pattern of variation. Conference publishers commonly take a transfer or an exclusive licence for the proceedings version while allowing authors to post an accepted manuscript in a repository, sometimes after an embargo and sometimes immediately; book publishers commonly allow authors to reuse material in later work with acknowledgement. None of these permissions should be assumed: the agreement you sign for the specific edition or volume is the document that governs, and it should be read before signature rather than after a repository deposit is questioned. If your funder mandates a particular licence or immediate open access, raise it before submission, not at the camera-ready stage, when options have usually narrowed.

A Practical Checklist Before You Submit

• Confirm the venue. Check that the call, imprint or series page you are looking at belongs to the genuine organiser or publisher. Conference names in particular are widely imitated by unrelated commercial operators, so navigate from the society or publisher site rather than from an unsolicited email invitation.
• Match the scope honestly. Read two or three recent papers or chapters and ask whether yours would sit naturally beside them in method, audience and level of contribution.
• Respect the format. Page limits, templates and anonymisation rules in proceedings and edited volumes are enforced mechanically; a paper can be excluded on formatting alone.
• Plan the whole cost. Add registration, travel, accommodation, visa and page or colour charges where they apply, and confirm that your institution will reimburse them before you commit.
• Check the indexing you need. Verify the specific database and the specific edition, in writing where the point is decisive for a degree or promotion case.
• Keep your own copy. Retain the accepted manuscript, the signed agreement and the final programme or table of contents; these are the documents that resolve later disputes about what was published and where.

Who Should Use This Profile, and Its Limits

This profile is written for researchers, librarians and students who need to place LNGC correctly: what kind of publication it is, who is responsible for it, what it publishes, how its selection process works and what its recorded indicators do and do not show. It is based on official publisher, society and organiser sources, on the structured record held by Journals World, and on established bibliometric listings, all consulted in October 2026. It is not a substitute for the current call for papers, author instructions or series guidelines, which are revised for each edition and each volume and which always take precedence. Figures given here should be re-checked against the source named beside them before they are used in an evaluation, a funding application or a thesis.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography a journal?

No. It is a Springer book series publishing edited volumes, each with its own ISBN and editors, under a shared series ISSN. It has no issues and no journal-style submission system.

What are its ISSNs?

Springer lists the series ISSN as 1863-2246 and the series electronic ISSN as 1863-2351.

Who publishes it?

Springer. The Journals World and SCImago records use the imprint form Springer Berlin; individual volumes also appear under Springer Cham and Springer International Publishing, reflecting Springer's publishing locations.

Can I submit a paper directly to the series?

Not in the journal sense. Papers reach the series through a conference or workshop whose proceedings or selected papers are published in it, or through an invitation to contribute a chapter to a planned edited volume. Book proposals for whole volumes go to Springer.

Who edits it?

The series editors printed in its volumes are William Cartwright, Georg Gartner, Liqiu Meng and Michael P. Peterson. Each volume additionally has its own editors, who are responsible for its contents.

Does it have an impact factor?

No Journal Impact Factor applies, because it is a book series rather than a journal. SCImago-derived listings do give it an SJR and quartiles within subject categories, and those figures vary by year and category.

What subjects does it cover?

Geographic information science, cartography and visualisation, spatial data handling, location-based services, digital terrain modelling, spatial data infrastructures, web and planetary mapping, and applied GIS for environment, health and crisis management.

Where do I read its volumes?

On SpringerLink, usually through a library subscription, in print, or by purchasing individual volumes or chapters from Springer. Each chapter carries its own DOI.

Sources consulted for this profile include Springer's own bibliographic records for series volumes (series ISSN 1863-2246, electronic ISSN 1863-2351, series editors and volume details), the Journals World structured record for this post, DBLP's listing of the series, and SCImago-derived listings. Details are summarised in the accompanying sources file.