Soil Science

About Soil Science

Soil Science — the journal, not just the discipline

Soil Science is one of the oldest journal titles in the earth and agricultural sciences, and that is exactly why it needs careful identification. The name is also the name of a whole discipline, and several other journals carry very similar titles. The record profiled here is specific: Soil Science, print ISSN 0038-075X and electronic ISSN 1538-9243, published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW), the health and science imprint associated with Wolters Kluwer. Its standard abbreviation is Soil Sci. Everything in this profile refers to that journal. It does not refer to the Soil Science Society of America Journal, to Soil Science and Plant Nutrition, to the European Journal of Soil Science, or to any national journal whose title translates as soil science. Readers who keep the ISSN pair in view will not confuse them, because each of those neighbouring titles carries a different ISSN, a different publisher and a different editorial home.

The publisher's own description, carried on the Wolters Kluwer Ovid page for the title, is compact and still useful. It says the journal served the professional needs of scientists and laboratory personnel involved in soil and plant research by publishing primary research reports and critical reviews of basic and applied soil science, especially as it relates to soil and plant studies and general environmental soil science. It adds that each month Soil Science presented authoritative research articles from an array of disciplines: soil chemistry and biochemistry, soil physics, fertility and nutrition, soil genesis and morphology, and soil microbiology and mineralogy. The same description notes its immediate relevance to soil scientists in industry and academia and its longer-range value for agronomists and environmental scientists, and it flags that an archive is available for purchase. That last detail matters, and this profile returns to it when discussing the journal's present status.

At a glance

• Full title: Soil Science
• Abbreviation: Soil Sci.
• Print ISSN: 0038-075X
• Electronic ISSN: 1538-9243
• Publisher: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW), part of Wolters Kluwer
• Country of publication: United States, as reported in SCImago-derived listings
• Founded: January 1916
• Founding editor: Jacob Goodale Lipman, who guided the journal for 23 years, according to the journal's centenary history
• Frequency in its active period: monthly, as described by the publisher
• Language: English
• Subject home: soil science in the broad sense — chemistry, physics, biology, genesis, fertility and environmental applications
• Scopus coverage as reported by secondary listings: 1916–2019, with the title listed as inactive in Scopus-derived summaries

A journal founded with a discipline

Soil Science emerged in January 1916 as a journal focused on soil fertility and allied fields. That dating comes from the centenary reflection on the journal published a hundred years later and summarised in the AGRIS record and in a University of York history note marking the centenary article by Professor David Moon. The centenary account stresses a question that preoccupied the founders: would soil science emerge as an independent scientific discipline, or would it remain a subset of general agricultural concerns? The journal was, in effect, an argument for independence, made month after month in print. A 2006 article in the journal itself, marking ninety years of publication, mined the limited archival material and the early published articles to reconstruct the challenges its founders faced and the actions that carried the title through its first nine decades.

The founding editor was Jacob Goodale Lipman, and the centenary history describes him as the journal's guiding force for 23 years. Lipman had come to the United States from the Russian Empire in his teens and received all of his scientific training in the United States, at Rutgers and Cornell Universities. That biography shaped the journal in a practical way. His knowledge of the Russian language and culture enabled him to serve as a bridge to the Russian soil science community, which at the time was central to the emerging discipline: the Russian tradition of soil geography and soil genesis was one of the intellectual sources from which modern pedology grew. The journal therefore became a longer-term vehicle for international intellectual exchange between soil scientists in the United States and in the Russian Empire, and after 1917 its successor state, at a time when few other channels existed.

Lipman also organised the first International Congress of Soil Science, held in Washington, DC, in 1927, which was followed by a transcontinental excursion for participants. Among the young scientists he helped bring to work at Rutgers, the centenary account singles out Selman A. Waksman, another migrant from the Russian Empire, who went on to win a Nobel Prize for work rooted in soil microbiology. These details are worth recording in a journal profile because they explain the journal's early authority. Soil Science was not simply reporting a field that existed elsewhere; its editor, its author network and its congress-building were part of how the field constituted itself as a discipline with its own methods, vocabulary and institutions.

Scope, read through the publisher's own list

The Ovid description divides the journal's world into named territories, and each territory corresponds to a recognisable research community. Working through them one by one is the most reliable way to understand what the journal published, because the list comes from the publisher rather than from a later aggregator.

Soil chemistry and biochemistry

This territory covers the chemical composition of soils and the transformations that take place within them: nutrient cycling, the behaviour of fertiliser elements, organic matter chemistry, and the biochemical processes mediated by soil organisms and enzymes. In the journal's pages, chemistry was never an abstract exercise. It was tied to the practical question of what soils supply to plants and to the environmental question of where applied chemicals go after they are added.

Soil physics

Soil physics addresses the physical properties and processes of soil: water movement and retention, aeration, temperature, structure and the mechanical behaviour of the soil mass. Work of this kind underpins irrigation science, drainage, erosion control and the modelling of how water and solutes move through the vadose zone toward groundwater. The publisher's decision to name physics separately signals that the journal welcomed measurement-driven and modelling-driven papers, not only descriptive ones.

Fertility and nutrition

Fertility and plant nutrition was the journal's founding concern in 1916, and it remained a core territory. Papers in this area examine how soils supply nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and micronutrients, how fertilisation changes that supply, and how soil conditions limit or enable plant growth. For much of the twentieth century this was the territory with the most direct line to farm practice, extension work and food production, which is one reason the journal mattered to readers well beyond university soil departments.

Soil genesis and morphology

Genesis and morphology concern how soils form over time and how their horizons and profiles can be described, classified and mapped. This is the pedological heart of the discipline, the part most closely connected to the Russian tradition Lipman helped transmit. Papers here tend to be place-based and comparative, building general understanding from carefully described profiles and landscapes.

Soil microbiology and mineralogy

Microbiology and mineralogy, named together by the publisher, cover the living and the crystalline foundations of soil behaviour: the micro-organisms that drive nutrient transformations, and the clay and primary minerals whose surfaces govern much of soil chemistry. Waksman's presence in the journal's early history is a reminder that soil microbiology was being built, in part, in these pages. Mineralogy, meanwhile, explains why two soils with similar texture can behave very differently in the field.

Environmental soil science

The publisher's phrase "general environmental soil science" marks the journal's outward turn. Soils sit at the interface of agriculture, water quality, waste management, land reclamation and climate. The description in the journal's own anniversary history makes the same point in stronger terms, linking soil quality management and the response of soil systems to global warming to the journal's continuing relevance. Readers approaching the archive today will find this environmental strand increasingly prominent in the later volumes.

What kind of articles it published

Two article kinds are named in the publisher's description: primary research reports and critical reviews. Primary research reports present original experimental, field or laboratory work. Critical reviews synthesise a body of literature and evaluate it, rather than merely summarising it. That pairing is characteristic of a mature disciplinary journal. The research reports build the record; the reviews periodically reorganise it, identify what is settled and point to what remains unresolved. For a present-day reader, the reviews in the archive are often the fastest entry point into a topic, while the research reports are the primary evidence to cite when a specific finding, method or measurement is at issue.

The journal also published reflective and historical material about its own discipline, of which the ninetieth-anniversary history and the centenary reflection are clear examples. Such pieces are easy to overlook in a metrics-driven reading of a journal, but they are part of why long-lived titles accumulate authority: they preserve the memory of how methods and questions changed, which helps new researchers avoid mistaking a recent framing for the whole history of a problem.

Status: an archive title, and why that matters

Any honest profile of Soil Science must address its present status directly, because the evidence available points in one direction. SCImago-derived listings report the journal's Scopus coverage as 1916–2019, and Scopus-derived summaries describe the title as discontinued or inactive in Scopus. The publisher's Ovid page, meanwhile, describes the journal in terms of its archive and notes that the archive is available for purchase; it does not present a current call for papers, a current issue or submission instructions in the material fetched for this profile. A current submission route, a current article-processing charge and current editorial-board details could not be verified from the official publisher pages fetched here, and they are therefore not stated as facts in this profile.

The practical consequences follow from that. First, researchers should not plan a submission to Soil Science on the assumption that it is actively receiving manuscripts; anyone considering it should obtain direct confirmation from LWW before preparing a manuscript in its format. Second, the journal's value today is principally archival and citational. Its century of volumes remains a primary record of twentieth-century soil research, and older papers from it continue to be cited because many foundational measurements and concepts were first reported there. Third, libraries and readers should treat access as an archive question — through the publisher's archive offering, through institutional holdings, or through the indexing services that retain its backfile — rather than as a current subscription question.

Metrics, with the caution they require

Secondary listings derived from SCImago and Scopus data report an h-index of 94 for Soil Science, a SCImago Journal Rank figure of 0.294, and a best quartile of Q3 in the soil science category, with overall rank figures that vary by the year of the listing. Those numbers are reported here as aggregator-reported figures, not as publisher-published figures, and they need two qualifications. The first is that a journal whose coverage ends in 2019 will show frozen or decaying recent-window metrics: a recent citations-per-document figure for a title that has stopped publishing measures the tail of its archive, not the performance of a living journal. One secondary summary accordingly shows very low recent citation counts for the final years, which is an artefact of cessation rather than evidence about the quality of its historical content. The second qualification is that an h-index accumulated over a century-long run is not comparable with the h-index of a young journal; it reflects longevity as much as influence. Used carefully, the metrics confirm that this was a substantial, long-running, internationally indexed title. Used carelessly, they would mislead in both directions.

No Clarivate Journal Impact Factor is claimed in this profile, because none was verified from a source fetched for it. Readers who need a Journal Citation Reports figure for a specific year should consult that year's reports directly through an institution that subscribes to them.

How to distinguish it from neighbouring titles

Confusion around this journal is common enough that a short disambiguation guide is genuinely useful.

Soil Science Society of America Journal is a different journal: it is the flagship title of the Soil Science Society of America, established in 1937 as the society's proceedings and carrying its present title since 1973, published by Wiley on the society's behalf, with print ISSN 0361-5995 and electronic ISSN 1435-0661. It is active and bimonthly. A citation to "Soil Sci. Soc. Am. J." is not a citation to Soil Science.

Soil Science and Plant Nutrition is a Japanese journal with a deceptively close print ISSN, 0038-0768, which differs from 0038-075X by only a few digits. Transcription errors between these two ISSNs are a known practical hazard when checking references by hand, and the electronic ISSNs resolve the ambiguity immediately.

The discipline itself is the third source of confusion. Search engines and reference lists often use "soil science" as a subject phrase. When a catalogue or a citation gives no publisher and no ISSN, it should not be assumed to refer to this journal; the ISSN pair 0038-075X and 1538-9243 is the test.

Reading and using the archive

For researchers, the most productive way to use Soil Science today is as a deep archive. Begin with the review articles on a topic to map its development, then move to the primary reports that the reviews cite for the findings that still carry weight. Pay attention to methods sections in older papers: soil analytical methods changed substantially across the journal's century, and a result reported in 1930 may rest on extraction or measurement procedures that later work revised. That does not diminish the archive; it means its papers should be read with the same methodological care one would apply to any historical scientific record.

For students, the journal's history pieces offer an unusually accessible route into how a discipline forms. The founding question — independent discipline or branch of agriculture — is a live example of boundary work in science, and Lipman's role as editor, congress organiser and bridge between national research traditions shows how much of that work is done by journals and their editors rather than by textbooks.

For librarians and research managers, the key facts are the ISSN pair, the LWW imprint, the 1916 start, the monthly rhythm during its active life, and the reported end of Scopus coverage in 2019. Those five facts are enough to resolve almost every catalogue query this title generates, and to explain to users why a search for current issues returns archive material instead.

Frequently asked questions

Is Soil Science still publishing? The evidence fetched for this profile — Scopus coverage reported as ending in 2019, an inactive listing in Scopus-derived summaries, and a publisher page centred on a purchasable archive — indicates a ceased or inactive title rather than an active one. Because no publisher statement of closure was fetched, this profile reports the position as it stands in those sources and advises direct confirmation with LWW for any decision that depends on it.

Who published Soil Science? Lippincott Williams & Wilkins. The JournalsWorld record's publisher field agrees with the publisher's own Ovid listing, which names Lippincott Williams & Wilkins (LWW) as publisher and gives ISSN 0038-075X.

What did it publish? Primary research reports and critical reviews across soil chemistry and biochemistry, soil physics, fertility and nutrition, soil genesis and morphology, soil microbiology and mineralogy, and general environmental soil science, in the publisher's own summary.

When was it founded and by whom? In January 1916, with Jacob Goodale Lipman as founding editor; the centenary history credits him with guiding it for 23 years.

What are its ISSNs? 0038-075X in print and 1538-9243 electronically, matching the ISSNs stored on the JournalsWorld record.

Is it the same as the Soil Science Society of America Journal? No. They are separate journals with different publishers, different ISSNs and different histories, as detailed above.

Verification notes

This profile is anchored on the JournalsWorld record for post 331228, whose title, slug and ISSNs match the publisher listing. Publisher facts are taken from the Wolters Kluwer Ovid page for Soil Science. Founding and editorial history are taken from the journal's centenary reflection as recorded in AGRIS and in the University of York history note, and from the journal's own ninetieth-anniversary history as indexed by LWW. Coverage, h-index, rank and quartile figures are attributed to SCImago- and Scopus-derived secondary listings and are labelled as such in the text. Details that could not be verified from a fetched source — a current editorial board, a current submission route, current charges and a formal closure statement — are recorded in this profile as not publicly disclosed in the sources consulted, rather than filled in by inference.