Transportation research procedia

About Transportation research procedia

Overview

Transportation Research Procedia is an open-access proceedings journal published by Elsevier on ScienceDirect, devoted entirely to publishing complete sets of conference proceedings in transportation research. Launched in 2014, it occupies a distinctive place in Elsevier's large Transportation Research family: where the family's lettered journals — Part A (Policy and Practice), Part B (Methodological), Part C (Emerging Technologies), Part D (Transport and Environment), Part E (Logistics and Transportation Review) and Part F (Traffic Psychology and Behaviour) — publish individually submitted, fully refereed articles, Transportation Research Procedia exists to give whole conferences a permanent, citable, openly readable home. A conference that publishes with the journal receives a dedicated online issue on ScienceDirect, carrying the full set of its papers, so that the record of the meeting survives as literature rather than as a printed volume on a shelf or a file on an organiser's hard drive.

Elsevier describes the journal's purpose plainly: it focuses entirely on publishing full sets of conference proceedings, enabling fast, worldwide dissemination so that conference delegates can publish their papers in a dedicated online issue on ScienceDirect. The journal publishes papers from conferences with an emphasis in any area of transportation research, covering all models, methods and analyses intended to solve, or support the solution of, the problems faced by public administrations, city authorities, public transport companies, service providers and logistics operators, among others. Every article is open access. Peer review is carried out under the responsibility of the conference organisers, who may use single-blind, double-blind or open review in line with international peer-review standards, with the guest editor of the conference issue accountable for the process. That division of labour — Elsevier provides the platform, the permanence and the indexing; the conference provides the scientific gatekeeping — is the single most important thing for a reader or author to understand about this journal, and this profile returns to it in detail below.

The Journals World record for the journal carries the ISSN pair 2352-1457 and 2352-1465; Elsevier's own shop and ScienceDirect listings identify the journal by ISSN 2352-1465, and OpenAlex groups the same pair of ISSNs under its source record for the title, which lists roughly nine thousand works. The journal is based in the Netherlands through Elsevier B.V. and publishes in English, although the conferences it serves are held on every continent and its authorship is correspondingly international.

Fast Facts

The Transportation Research Family — and This Journal's Job Within It

The Transportation Research brand is one of the oldest in the field, built up by Pergamon and then Elsevier from the 1960s and 1970s onwards into a family of specialised journals that between them cover transport policy, methodology, technology, environment, logistics and driver behaviour. By the early 2010s the family had a structural gap. Transportation conferences had grown large, international and methodologically serious — meetings on transport modelling, traffic safety, public transport, logistics and intelligent transport systems were generating hundreds of refereed papers a year — yet their proceedings typically appeared as one-off books, CDs or conference websites, poorly indexed, hard to cite and often effectively lost within a few years. Transportation Research Procedia, launched in 2014, was Elsevier's answer: a procedia-format journal, modelled on the publisher's successful Procedia series in other disciplines, that would publish those proceedings as proper journal issues — DOIs, volume and page numbering, ScienceDirect hosting, and open access throughout — under the family name that the community already trusted.

The growth since then shows the gap was real. The journal reached volume 95 by 2026, a single volume of which can run to more than a thousand pages, and OpenAlex counts on the order of nine thousand works under the title. The conferences carried in its pages span the field's geography and subject matter: large recurring international meetings on transport research and traffic psychology sit alongside regional and specialist conferences on topics from cycling and walking to freight, aviation and road safety. For the transportation research community, the journal has become the default archive of record for conference literature — the place a practitioner looks first when a result was presented at a meeting and they need the citable text.

Scope: What Conferences and Papers Belong Here

Elsevier frames the scope by audience as much as by topic: the journal publishes conference papers in any area of transportation research, including all models, methods and analyses intended to solve, and to support the solution of, problems faced by public administrations, city authorities, public transport companies, service providers, logistics operators and similar bodies. In practice, the volumes reflect the full breadth of the discipline.

Transport planning, policy and demand

Travel demand modelling and forecasting, land-use and transport interaction, transport appraisal and policy evaluation, pricing and regulation, and studies of new mobility services — the most-cited paper in the journal's history is a critical review of new mobility services for urban transport, which shows how strongly this planning strand resonates with readers.

Traffic flow, operations and intelligent transport systems

Traffic theory and simulation, network operations, traffic management and control, connected and automated vehicles — another of the journal's most-cited contributions models lane-changing behaviour in a connected environment using game theory — and the data systems that modern traffic operations depend on.

Public transport and active travel

Transit planning and operations, service quality, integration and ticketing, and the growing literature on cycling, walking and micromobility, including the design of streets and networks for people on foot and on bicycles.

Logistics, freight and supply chains

City logistics, freight modelling, port and terminal operations, cold chains and the decarbonisation of freight — a 2026 volume, for example, carries work on agent-based modelling of a zero-emission beef cold chain — reflecting how far the proceedings reach beyond passenger transport.

Safety, environment and sustainability

Road safety analysis, crash and injury research, emissions and air quality, transport decarbonisation and climate adaptation, and the health dimensions of transport choices, all appear regularly — themes on which conferences, rather than journals, are often the first venue where new results surface.

How Publishing Works Here — Read This Before You Submit Anything

Transportation Research Procedia does not accept ordinary direct submissions from individual authors in the way a conventional journal does. The unit of publication is the conference. An organising committee agrees with Elsevier to publish its proceedings in the journal; the papers in the resulting issue are the papers accepted by that conference, prepared to the journal's template and delivered as a complete set. An author therefore “publishes in” Transportation Research Procedia by presenting at a participating conference: if a conference you are attending announces that its proceedings will appear in the journal, your accepted conference paper, revised as the conference requires and formatted to the procedia template, will appear in the dedicated issue, usually under the conference's name and branding on ScienceDirect. If your conference has no such arrangement, there is no individual route in — the correct target is one of the family's refereed journals, or another proceedings outlet attached to your meeting.

Peer review follows the same conference-centred logic. Elsevier states that peer review is under the responsibility of the conference organisers, who, according to international peer-review standards, may use single-blind, double-blind or open review; for the details of the process for a particular conference, the publisher directs authors to the conference organiser or the guest editor of the issue. Two consequences follow for readers. First, the review threshold of a Procedia paper is the threshold of its conference — set by that meeting's scientific committee — and is not identical to the threshold of Transportation Research Part A or Part C; the journal does not claim otherwise, and citation practice in the field treats procedia papers accordingly, as refereed conference literature. Second, the named guest editors of each issue, drawn from the conference's leadership, carry public accountability for what their issue contains, and issues state their provenance openly. Judged as what it is — a permanent, indexed, open-access archive of refereed conference papers — the model is honest and highly useful; judged as if it were a conventional journal, it would be misunderstood.

Open Access and Licensing

All content in the journal is open access, readable by anyone on ScienceDirect without a subscription — the property that makes conference literature in this journal genuinely disseminated, rather than formally published but practically invisible. Elsevier states that, for authors publishing in Transportation Research Procedia, accepted manuscripts are governed by the CC BY-NC-ND licence or another suitable licence, referring readers to its copyright information and list of open-access user licences for detail. CC BY-NC-ND permits redistribution for non-commercial purposes with attribution, while reserving derivative and commercial uses; authors whose funders require a more permissive licence should raise the question with the conference organisers and the publisher before the issue is finalised, because licence choice in a proceedings issue is arranged at issue level. The costs of proceedings publication are likewise arranged between the publisher and the conference — commonly built into the conference's own finances — rather than billed to individual authors as a conventional article processing charge; no per-author fee figure is stated in this profile, because the publisher's public pages for the journal do not publish a single standard author fee, and any conference-specific arrangement is a matter for that conference's agreement.

Indexing, Metrics and Standing

The journal is covered by Scopus — aggregator records show coverage beginning in 2014, the journal's launch year — and its content is fully searchable on ScienceDirect and through Google Scholar and OpenAlex. Scopus-derived compilations give the journal an h-index in the high fifties and a SCImago Journal Rank of roughly 0.39, with an impact score of about 2.0 in recent compilations; those figures are reported here as attributed aggregator values, and they should be read in the right frame. A proceedings journal's citation averages blend the output of dozens of unrelated conferences, so its metrics describe the visibility of the format — the fact that conference papers here are found and cited at all — rather than the selectivity of a single editorial office. Researchers citing metrics for evaluation purposes should use the current Scopus or SCImago record for the title and should describe the venue accurately, as a refereed proceedings journal; tenure and promotion files that present it as equivalent to the family's lettered journals misdescribe it, and so do files that dismiss it as unrefereed. It is neither: it is exactly what its title says.

The journal's real standing is best seen in its citation classics. Its most-cited papers — on new mobility services and urban transport, on automated vehicles and the rethinking of mobility and cities, and on lane-changing in connected traffic — are conference papers that became field reference points because the format put them, immediately and openly, in front of the worldwide readership of ScienceDirect. That is the dissemination bargain the journal was created to strike, and on the evidence of a decade of volumes it has struck it successfully.

For Conference Organisers and Authors

Organisers considering the journal for a proceedings should approach Elsevier early: a dedicated issue must be agreed, guest editors named, a review process documented that meets the publisher's stated standard, and a production schedule set that authors can meet — template compliance across a whole conference is the commonest production bottleneck, so instructions to authors should go out with the call for papers, not after acceptance. Authors, for their part, should do three things. First, confirm that their conference's proceedings arrangement actually names this journal, rather than assuming it from the conference's branding. Second, write the paper as literature, not as a talk: the version in the journal is the permanent one, will be read by people who never attended the meeting, and should carry the full method, data provenance and limitations that a journal reader needs. Third, check the published issue when it appears — title, author list, affiliations and licence line — and report errors to the guest editor promptly, while correction is straightforward.

Reading and Using This Literature Well

Because each issue is a conference, the journal rewards a reading strategy different from the one a conventional journal teaches. Start from the issue, not the article: the issue page on ScienceDirect names the conference, its place and dates and its guest editors, and the preface or editorial material — where the issue carries it — explains the meeting's themes, the size of its submission pool and how its review was run. That context tells you how to weight what follows. A paper from a large, established international meeting with documented double-blind review carries a different prior than a paper from a small first-time workshop, and the journal, to its credit, gives you the information to tell the two apart instead of dressing every issue in identical clothes.

Practitioners outside academia — the city officials, transport authority staff and consultants whom Elsevier names in the journal's own scope statement — are among its heaviest users, and for good reason. Conference proceedings are where applied transport research appears first: the before-and-after study of a bus priority scheme, the first evaluation of a fare change, the safety audit method a national agency is piloting. Much of that work will never be republished in a lettered journal, because its value is local and practical rather than methodological. In this journal it is preserved, citable and open, and a practitioner searching ScienceDirect for a city's name or a scheme type will often find that the only published evaluation anywhere sits in these pages. Academic readers use the journal complementarily: to find the earliest version of an idea, to trace what a research group presented before its journal articles appeared, and to survey a sub-field's current concerns through the table of contents of its main conference — a faster instrument for that purpose than any single journal issue.

Finally, a word on citation hygiene. Cite a Procedia paper as what it is, with the journal title, volume and pages as ScienceDirect gives them, and, where it matters to your argument, name the conference in your text. The papers' DOIs resolve permanently, the volumes are part of the journal's continuous numbering, and there is no need to apologise for the source: refereed conference literature is a normal, honoured stratum of transportation research. The one thing not to do is to upgrade the venue in a reference list or a CV — the record is strong enough to stand as itself.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Transportation Research Procedia?

An open-access journal published by Elsevier on ScienceDirect that exists entirely to publish full sets of transportation conference proceedings as dedicated online issues.

Can I submit a paper directly to the journal?

The journal's unit of publication is the conference issue, not the individual submission. Authors publish here by presenting at a conference whose organisers have arranged for its proceedings to appear in the journal.

Who is responsible for peer review?

The conference organisers, under international peer-review standards, using single-blind, double-blind or open review; the guest editor of each issue is the contact for the specifics of that conference's process, as Elsevier's own description states.

Is Transportation Research Procedia open access?

Yes. All articles are open access, governed by CC BY-NC-ND or another suitable licence from the publisher's open-access licence list.

What are the journal's ISSNs?

Elsevier identifies the journal by ISSN 2352-1465. This site record also carries 2352-1457, and OpenAlex groups the two numbers under a single source record for the title.

How does it differ from Transportation Research Part A, B or C?

The lettered parts are conventional refereed journals taking individual submissions in their sub-fields. Transportation Research Procedia publishes refereed conference proceedings as complete issues, with review run by the conferences themselves.

When did the journal start?

It was launched in 2014; Scopus coverage and OpenAlex records both begin with the 2014 volumes.

Sources consulted for this profile include Elsevier's official journal description for Transportation Research Procedia (Elsevier shop journal page, reproducing the journal's aims and peer-review model), ScienceDirect volume records for the journal, and attributed Scopus/SCImago aggregator compilations for coverage dates and metrics. Metrics are reported with their source; verify current values in Scopus or SCImago before citing them.