The Professional Geographer

About The Professional Geographer

The Professional Geographer — Journal Profile

The Professional Geographer is a long-established, peer-reviewed journal of geography published by Routledge, part of Taylor & Francis, on behalf of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). It began as a publication of the American Society for Professional Geographers and became a journal of the association in 1949, the year the two organisations combined; it has been published continuously since. Its print ISSN is 0033-0124 and its online ISSN is 1467-9272, and its articles carry DOIs in the Taylor & Francis series for the title, of the form 10.1080/00330124… Where the association’s flagship, the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, publishes major, full-length research articles, The Professional Geographer is the association’s home for shorter work: concise research papers, methodological contributions, research notes and commentaries that raise a sharp point, report a focused empirical finding, or open a debate. This profile explains the journal’s history, scope, article types, review process, editorial position, indexing and citation standing, and how a geographer should judge whether a piece of work belongs here rather than in the Annals or in a specialist journal.

At a Glance

One cataloguing point is worth making at the start, because it causes real confusion in databases. The title is cited both with and without its opening article — The Professional Geographer and Professional Geographer — and both forms refer to the same journal, with the same ISSN pair and the same 1949 start as an association journal. A catalogue record under either form is a record of this title, not of a separate publication.

History and Development

The journal’s own account, repeated by its publisher and by the AAG, is that The Professional Geographer was initially a publication of the American Society for Professional Geographers and became a journal of the Association of American Geographers in 1949, when that society and the association combined. The association itself — founded in 1904 and known for most of its life as the Association of American Geographers, now styling itself the American Association of Geographers — has treated publishing as a core activity throughout its existence, and this title became the second pillar of its journal programme alongside the Annals, which dates from 1911.

The division of labour established in those years still describes the two journals. The AAG’s publications manual puts it plainly: the Annals is the association’s premier journal for major research articles, while The Professional Geographer publishes concise research papers, technical reports and brief reviews, ranging in approach from rigorously analytical to broadly philosophical or prescriptive, and provides a forum for new ideas, alternative viewpoints and debate, with emphasis on questions of broad interest to geographers. That word “professional” in the title is historical, not vocational in the modern careers sense: the founding society was a body of practising, applied geographers, and the journal kept a practical, profession-facing openness to applied work, methods and technique that a purely academic title might not have had. Contemporary contents bear that out. Recent issues available on the publisher’s site mix physical geography, human geography and methods without apology — work on natural hazards in North Korea, on the geography of major-league sports venues, on non-tenure-track faculty in United States geography, on fragile geologic features used for palaeoseismic constraints in South Korea, and on driver-training “deserts” mapped as a decision-support problem.

Longevity has brought the usual apparatus of a mature society journal. Every year the journal publishes a special section of papers that were finalists for the J. Warren Nystrom Award, the AAG award for the best paper based on a recent dissertation in geography — a section that makes the journal a useful place to see emerging scholars’ first major publications. Book reviewing, once a regular feature of the journal, now sits largely with the association’s dedicated review title, the AAG Review of Books, launched in 2013, which the association describes as the new forum for the book reviews formerly published in the Annals and in The Professional Geographer. The journal is published from the Taylor & Francis offices at Milton Park, Abingdon, in England, as the Web of Science listing for the title records, while editorial direction comes from its academic editor and board within the geography profession, and association members receive online access to the AAG journals as part of the association’s publishing programme.

Scope and Article Types

The publisher’s current aims and scope statement is short and should be quoted in substance: the journal “publishes short articles of academic or applied geography, emphasizing empirical studies and methodologies. These features may range in content and approach from rigorously analytic to broadly philosophical or prescriptive. The journal provides a forum for new ideas and alternative viewpoints.” Three implications follow. First, length and focus are part of the remit: this is a journal for a single, well-made point — an empirical result, a method, a dataset, an intervention in a debate — presented completely but without the extended literature architecture of a flagship article. Second, method is a subject in its own right here; a paper whose contribution is a technique, a measure, a mapping approach or a teaching or field method is not a poor relation of a results paper but one of the journal’s stated kinds. Third, the philosophical and prescriptive range is real: conceptual, reflective and position pieces have a home here that they may not have in more strictly empirical titles, provided they speak to geographers broadly.

The publisher lists four article types. Regular Manuscripts are the standard short research articles. Focus Sections are grouped sets of papers on a common theme. Research Notes are shorter contributions; the publisher directs intending authors of Research Notes and Commentaries to contact the Managing Editor at the AAG journals address before proceeding. Commentaries are the debate form, and their responses are handled under a different, single-anonymous review arrangement described below. In subject terms the journal is deliberately whole-discipline. Its most-cited papers, in the aggregations discussed in the metrics section, include feminist and reflexive work on fieldwork and positionality, work on intersectionality, economic and urban geography, cartography and GIScience, and physical and environmental geography. An author in any subfield of geography can therefore find precedent in its pages, and an author whose paper speaks across subfields — for example a methods paper with an environmental application, or an urban study with a conceptual claim — is using the journal as it is meant to be used.

Peer Review and Editorial Process

Taylor & Francis states the review policy for this title explicitly, and it is one of the clearer statements among society journals. All Articles, Forums, Research Notes and Commentaries submitted to the journal undergo double-anonymous peer review by one to three referees, one of whom will be the editor or a designate. Commentary Responses undergo single-anonymous peer review. Double-anonymous means that neither author nor referee knows the other’s identity during review, and authors should prepare their manuscripts accordingly, removing self-identifying material in the form the publisher’s instructions for authors require. The publisher also directs authors to read its Instructions for Authors and Editorial Policies in full before submitting, and those documents, rather than this profile, are the authority on formatting, ethics declarations, data and supplementary material, and on the mechanics of the submission system.

Editorially, the journal is led by an academic editor from within the discipline, supported by a board; the standard reference listing for the title names Heejun Chang as editor. Editorial personnel change on fixed terms in society journals, and the board printed on the Taylor & Francis journal page at the time you submit is the one to rely on for names, affiliations and any special-section calls. Two practical points follow from the society model. Decisions are made by geographers for a geography readership, so a covering explanation of why a paper matters to geographers beyond its immediate subfield is worth writing carefully. And the journal’s calendar follows the association’s: focus sections, award sections and themed groupings mean that some content is commissioned or clustered, so an author proposing a focus section should approach the editor first rather than submitting a set of papers unannounced.

Indexing and Citation Standing

The Professional Geographer sits in the established, selective tier of geography journals, and its indexing record is correspondingly strong. Clarivate’s Master Journal List records the title, with ISSN 0033-0124 and eISSN 1467-9272 and the Routledge / Taylor & Francis publisher address, in the Social Sciences Citation Index, with additional coverage in Current Contents: Social and Behavioral Sciences and Essential Science Indicators. The journal’s standard reference listing adds a long abstracting and indexing record that includes GEOBASE, GeoRef, the International Bibliography of the Social Sciences, EBSCO databases, Academic ASAP, the Bibliography and Index of Geology, Environmental Sciences and Pollution Management, Meteorological and Geoastrophysical Abstracts, InfoTrac OneFile and the Social Sciences Citation Index. It is also covered by Scopus, as its SCImago record shows. For most academic purposes — tenure and promotion files, national research assessments, doctoral thesis bibliographies — this is the coverage that matters, and authors can verify each item at the index concerned rather than taking any secondary listing, including this one, on trust.

Citation metrics should be read with their years attached, because several different figures circulate for this journal and they are not interchangeable. According to the Journal Citation Reports figures reported in the journal’s reference listing, the journal had a 2021 impact factor of 2.411, ranking 46th of 85 journals in the Geography category of that year. The AAG’s own current journals page gives a later picture: an impact factor of 1.9, ranking 64th out of 173 geography journals worldwide — a larger category denominator, which is why the rank number is not comparable with the 2021 figure even though the two are often placed side by side. Secondary aggregators add other measures on other bases: one widely used journal-metrics service reports a CiteScore of 3.5, a SNIP of 1.24 and an SJR quartile of Q2 for the title, and the SCImago-derived h-index for the journal is high for a journal of short papers. OpenAlex, the open bibliographic index, records about 5,986 works for the source, a summary h-index of 128 and a two-year mean citedness of about 2.13 — figures that reflect more than seven decades of accumulated, citable short papers. The honest summary is that this is a mid-to-upper ranking geography journal: not the discipline’s highest-impact title, which its own association reserves that description for the Annals, but a respected, well-indexed society journal whose papers are found, read and cited across the discipline. An older figure still circulating in the Journals World stored record for the duplicate listing of this title gives an h-index of 97; that is best read as an earlier snapshot of the same rising count, not as a competing fact.

The journal’s most-cited individual papers illustrate its reach. A citation aggregation for the title lists, among its most-cited articles, “Getting Personal: Reflexivity, Positionality, and Feminist Research”, “Theorizing and Researching Intersectionality: A Challenge for Feminist Geography”, and “Playing the Field: Questions of Fieldwork in Geography” — all methodological or conceptual pieces rather than conventional empirical reports. That is a genuine feature of this journal’s history: because it welcomed reflective, prescriptive and debate contributions, several of the papers through which geographers learned to talk about how they do research appeared here, and they continue to be assigned and cited long after publication.

Publishing Model and Access

The journal is a subscription-based society journal published on a commercial publisher’s platform, with the hybrid arrangements normal for Taylor & Francis titles: articles are published online on the publisher’s site, association members have online access to the AAG’s journals, institutional subscribers take the title in geography and social-science collections, and individual authors may have open-access routes under the publisher’s current policies and any institutional agreements that apply to their affiliation. Some content is marked free or open access on the journal site, including editorials and selected articles. Because open-access eligibility, article charges and institutional agreements change frequently and depend on the author’s institution and funder, none of them is stated as a figure in this profile; the publisher’s page for the title and its author services are the places to establish the position for a specific manuscript. What can be said without risk of going out of date is the shape of the model: no author needs to pay simply to be considered, the journal’s costs are met principally through subscriptions and association arrangements, and any optional open-access charge is a separate decision taken after, not before, peer review.

Is This Journal Right for Your Paper?

Choose The Professional Geographer when your paper is short, complete and aimed at geographers generally: a focused empirical finding that does not need thirty pages, a method or measure others can adopt, a dataset or field technique worth reporting, a research note that corrects or extends a published result, or a commentary that intervenes in a live debate in the discipline. It is a particularly natural home for work that crosses the human–physical or the conceptual–applied divide, for early-career work of dissertation origin — the Nystrom finalist sections show the journal’s openness to it — and for papers whose value lies in being read quickly and widely within the profession rather than in anchoring a specialist subfield.

Look elsewhere, or first, when your paper is a major, field-defining research article with a long theoretical build: that is the Annals’ stated territory within the same association, and editors may redirect over-long or flagship-scale submissions in that direction. Look elsewhere also when your audience is a single specialist community — glaciologists, transport modellers, health geographers — who read their own titles first, or when your funder or institution requires a publication route or licence that this title’s current terms do not provide. In every case, read two or three recent issues before submitting. The best single test of fit for a whole-discipline journal is whether your paper’s first two paragraphs would interest the reader who has just finished the paper before yours in the issue — a reader who is a geographer, but not necessarily a geographer in your subfield.

A final, practical note on records: because this journal is listed in catalogues both as The Professional Geographer and as Professional Geographer, authors citing it should use one form consistently — the publisher’s form, with the opening “The”, is recommended — and should always pair the title with an ISSN or a DOI when a bibliography, a catalogue or a research-information system might otherwise treat the two forms as two journals.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile is based on the publisher’s journal page for The Professional Geographer on tandfonline.com (aims and scope, article types and peer-review policy), the American Association of Geographers’ journals page and its Publications of the Association manual (history, role among the AAG journals, current issue frequency and impact-factor statement), Clarivate’s Master Journal List entry for ISSN 0033-0124 / 1467-9272 (Web of Science coverage), the journal’s standard reference listing (founding details, CODEN, LCCN, indexing list and the 2021 Journal Citation Reports figure), and the OpenAlex source record for the title for open bibliometric counts. Each metric is attributed to its source and year in the text; figures from different years and different providers are not directly comparable and should be re-checked at the source before being quoted in an application or assessment.