Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Change

About Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Change

About WIREs Climate Change

Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, usually shortened to WIREs Climate Change, is a peer-reviewed review journal published by John Wiley & Sons. It began publication in 2010 and is identified by print ISSN 1757-7780 and electronic ISSN 1757-7799. Unlike a conventional primary-research journal, it does not exist mainly to report a single new experiment or a single new data set. Its purpose is to commission and publish authoritative, synthetic reviews that explain what is known, what is contested and what remains uncertain across the whole breadth of climate change research. That breadth is the defining feature of the title. Climate change is treated at once as a physical process, an ecological pressure, an economic problem, a policy challenge, a matter of law and ethics, and an idea that shapes how societies imagine their futures.

Readers who arrive at this profile looking for a quick verdict can take away a clear one. This is an established, selective, Q1-ranked review journal with a long Scopus and SCImago record from 2010 onward, a bimonthly publication rhythm, and a reputation built on long, carefully edited overview articles rather than on short research reports. Researchers do not normally submit unsolicited primary findings here in the way they would to a field journal. They read it to orient themselves, to teach from it, to find the recognised experts on a question, and, when invited or when a proposal is accepted, to write the kind of synthesis that other scholars will cite for years.

Quick Facts

History and Founding Idea

The first issue appeared in early 2010, after about two years of planning. Wiley presented the title as a new kind of review project for a subject that could not be contained inside one discipline. In the launch account, founding editor-in-chief Mike Hulme argued that climate change had to be understood both as physical change and as an idea changing society and the way people think about the future. That sentence, in paraphrase, still explains the editorial design. A physicist studying radiative forcing, a geographer studying coastal adaptation, a political scientist studying negotiations, and a historian studying earlier climate debates are all, for this journal, studying connected parts of one phenomenon, and the reviews are expected to speak across those boundaries rather than only to a narrow specialist circle.

Hulme returned to the experiment in editorial essays after four years and again as the journal approached its tenth anniversary. The four-year reflection noted that the journal had already published more than 200 review articles, at a pace of more than one per week. Those editorials are useful primary evidence for a profile because they show a journal consciously auditing itself: asking whether interdisciplinary reviewing was producing new ways of thinking, whether social science and physical science contributions were appearing in a productive balance, and whether the category system used to organise articles was helping readers navigate a field that kept expanding. Few review journals document their own reasoning that openly, and researchers who want to understand why an article here looks different from an article in a disciplinary journal should start with those editorials.

The journal belongs to the wider WIREs family, a group of Wiley interdisciplinary review titles built on a similar model in areas such as water, energy and the environment, cognitive science and other cross-cutting fields. Membership in that family matters for practical reasons. Articles share a recognisable structure, a category taxonomy is printed with each article, advanced reviews and overviews are distinguished by function, and the online presentation groups content by theme so that a reader entering through one review can move sideways into neighbouring topics. It also matters for citation practice: the journal abbreviation and the DOI pattern are stable, and libraries catalogue the title under its full form, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, even when authors shorten it in conversation to WIREs Climate Change.

What the Journal Publishes

The core content is the long review. An article in this journal is expected to synthesise a literature, not merely list it. A strong contribution defines a question, explains the main schools of thought or the main lines of evidence, weighs agreement and disagreement, shows where methods differ, and ends by identifying what a careful reader should conclude and what remains open. Alongside the long reviews, the journal has used shorter and more interventionist formats, including perspectives, commentaries, editorials and debate-oriented pieces, especially where a topic is fast-moving or where scholars disagree in public about interpretation or policy. The balance can shift over time, so authors should always check the current author guidance on the Wiley site before assuming a format is open to unsolicited work.

Every article is placed inside a category structure, and examples visible in published articles show how wide that structure is. Categories encountered in recent volumes include climate economics under economics and climate change, governing climate change in communities, cities and regions, national climate change policy, evaluating future impacts of climate change, perceptions of climate change, and social justice and the politics of development. Earlier categorisations also cover the physical science of climate variability and models, paleoclimate and geological evidence, impacts on ecosystems and biodiversity, mitigation technologies, adaptation practice, climate communication, and the history and culture of climate ideas. A paper may sit under more than one heading, which is deliberate: the taxonomy is a map of connections, not a set of sealed boxes.

Physical climate and Earth-system topics

Reviews on the physical side examine how the climate system works and how it is changing: atmospheric processes, oceans, ice, land surface change, climate modelling, detection and attribution, paleoclimate reconstructions and projections of future change. Because the audience includes non-specialists, these reviews carry a particular responsibility to explain uncertainty honestly, to distinguish model output from observation, and to translate technical confidence language into terms a policy reader or a social scientist can use without distortion.

Impacts, vulnerability and adaptation

A second large territory covers impacts on ecosystems, food and water systems, health, coasts and cities, together with vulnerability, resilience and adaptation. Here the journal is valuable precisely because adaptation research is scattered across geography, ecology, public health, engineering and development studies. A synthesis that places engineering options beside community experience and beside the economics of risk gives planners and researchers a shared starting point that no single disciplinary review could supply.

Mitigation, energy and economics

Reviews also address mitigation: energy transitions, carbon pricing and finance, land-based mitigation, geoengineering proposals and their governance, and the economics of acting early or late. Contributors are expected to separate technical potential from political feasibility and to be explicit about assumptions in scenarios. Recent content on banking, climate finance and disclosure in South Asia illustrates the pattern well: a financial-regulation topic is treated as a climate topic because capital allocation shapes emissions and exposure.

Policy, governance, communication and ideas

The fourth territory, and the one that most distinguishes this title from a purely scientific review series, covers policy and governance at international, national and local levels, public perception and communication, media, ethics, law, history and culture. Debate about the effectiveness of international agreements appeared in the inaugural issue alongside ethical debate, and that pairing set the tone for everything that followed. Scholars of science communication, environmental humanities and political science are therefore core contributors, not guests.

Editorial Model and How Contribution Usually Works

Review journals of this kind operate differently from journals that live on unsolicited submissions. Many articles are commissioned: editors identify a topic that needs a synthesis, invite recognised authors, agree a scope, and then subject the resulting manuscript to peer review and substantial editing. Proposals from prospective authors may also be considered, depending on the current guidance, but a researcher should never assume that a finished manuscript can simply be uploaded and will be sent out in the ordinary way. The sensible route is to study recent articles in the intended category, check whether a synthesis on the same question has appeared recently, read the current Wiley author guidance for the title, and, where the guidance invites it, approach the editorial office with a concise proposal explaining the question, the authors' standing in the field and why a new synthesis is needed now.

Peer review for a review article tests different things from peer review for a laboratory paper. Reviewers ask whether the coverage is fair, whether major counter-arguments have been represented, whether the structure helps a reader from another discipline, whether figures and summary tables genuinely clarify, and whether conclusions go beyond what the cited evidence supports. Authors should expect requests to rebalance sections, to add missing literatures, and to make the language accessible without making it vague. That editorial labour is part of what readers are paying for when a library subscribes.

The founding editor was Mike Hulme, whose name appears on the launch material and on the retrospective editorials of 2014 and 2018. Editorial leadership and domain editors change over a journal's life, and this profile deliberately does not present a possibly outdated full masthead as current fact. Anyone who needs the present editor-in-chief, domain editors or editorial office contact for a live submission decision should take those names from the journal's own Wiley page on the day they need them, and cite that page, not a secondary directory, in any formal correspondence.

Indexing, Rankings and What the Numbers Mean

SCImago, drawing on Scopus data, records the journal with coverage from 2010 onward and places it in three categories: Atmospheric Science, Geography, Planning and Development, and Global and Planetary Change, with a best quartile of Q1. In the SCImago-derived figures reported for the period preceding 2024, the journal had an SJR of 3.803, an h-index of 127 and an overall ranking that put it among the highest-ranked titles in this profile set. Separate reporting based on Scopus data gives a CiteScore of 14.5 and a SNIP of 2.83. Those figures should be read with care and with their year attached. SJR, CiteScore, SNIP and any Journal Impact Factor are different instruments, calculated differently, updated on different cycles, and none of them should be quoted without naming the source and the year.

What can a reader safely conclude from the pattern, rather than from any single number? First, the journal is firmly established in Scopus-based rankings and has been continuously covered since its first year, which rules out any suggestion that it is a new or untested title. Second, its Q1 standing in three different category systems shows that its influence is not confined to one community: atmospheric scientists, geographers and global-change researchers all cite it. Third, a high h-index for a review journal is expected in part, because reviews attract citations, so the number should be used to compare this title with other review titles, not with primary-research journals in a single specialty. Used that way, the metrics support the qualitative picture: a mature, heavily used synthesis journal.

Indexing claims should always be verified in the source itself. For a formal evaluation, check the Scopus source list for the two ISSNs, check Web of Science coverage through a subscribing library, and check the Wiley site for the journal's own indexing statement. A current impact factor, if an institution requires one, is a Journal Citation Reports figure and is not published in full in this profile because it changes annually and is not publicly disclosed in a stable open form by the publisher.

Access, Reading and Library Use

The journal is published online on Wiley Online Library, with volumes organised by year and issues appearing bimonthly. Individual articles carry DOIs in the 10.1002/wcc series, and libraries commonly provide access through Wiley subscriptions or through aggregator arrangements. Some articles are open access, either because authors or funders chose that route or because an article was made freely readable by the publisher, and the licence for each open article is shown on its own page. Readers should not assume that because one article is free, the whole journal is free, or that because an abstract is visible, the full text is open. Always check the individual article page.

For teaching, this is one of the most practical climate titles a lecturer can assign. A single advanced review can serve as the spine of a seminar week, giving students a shared vocabulary before they read primary papers. For literature reviews, the articles are useful in two directions: backwards, through their reference lists, into the primary literature they synthesise, and forwards, through citation tracking, into the newer work that has tested or extended their conclusions. For policy and practice readers, the policy, adaptation and communication categories offer entry points written for comprehension outside the author's home discipline.

Who Should Read It, and Who Should Aim to Write for It

The natural readership is unusually wide: climate scientists who need the social context of their results, social scientists who need an accurate account of the physical evidence, geographers, ecologists, economists, public-health researchers, planners, and graduate students entering any of those fields. It is also a rational first stop for journalists and officials who need a peer-reviewed synthesis rather than a press release, provided they read the uncertainty discussion and not only the summary.

As a writing target, it suits established scholars and teams who can genuinely synthesise across studies, including teams that pair a physical scientist with a social scientist or a practitioner. It does not suit a single new empirical result, a narrow case study with no wider claim, or a literature list without an argument. Early-career researchers most often contribute as co-authors on a commissioned synthesis, or by first publishing primary work in disciplinary journals and building the standing from which a review invitation or an accepted proposal becomes realistic.

Distinguishing This Journal from Similar Titles

Three confusions recur. First, this title is not Global Change Biology, a Wiley primary-research journal with different ISSNs, even though the audiences overlap. Second, it is not any other WIREs title: the WIREs family shares branding, so a citation must include the Climate Change part of the title and ideally the ISSN or DOI. Third, the hyphen and colon vary in how catalogues render the title, Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews-Climate Change in some listings and Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change in others; that punctuation difference does not indicate a different journal, and the ISSN pair 1757-7780 and 1757-7799 is the reliable identifier.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is WIREs Climate Change a review journal or a research journal?

It is a review journal. Its main content is commissioned and peer-reviewed synthesis, overview and perspective material, not first reports of new experiments.

What are the ISSNs?

Print ISSN 1757-7780 and electronic ISSN 1757-7799. Use those numbers in library searches and in any formal journal evaluation.

When did it start, and how often does it appear?

It started in 2010 and appears bimonthly, six issues per year, according to publisher and indexing listings.

Is it ranked Q1?

SCImago places it in Q1 in Atmospheric Science, in Geography, Planning and Development, and in Global and Planetary Change. Quartiles are category- and year-specific, so name the category and year when quoting them.

Can I submit a manuscript without an invitation?

Check the current Wiley author guidance first. Review titles of this kind rely heavily on commissioned work and on proposals, so a cold submission of a finished review risks rejection for fit alone, however good the writing is.

Is the journal open access?

It is primarily a subscription journal with open-access articles inside it. The access status and licence are decided article by article and are shown on each article page.

Sources and Verification

This profile is based on the publisher launch account of the title, the journal's own editorial retrospectives, its Wiley Online Library presence, ISSN information in indexing listings, and SCImago-derived ranking data as reported by ranking services. Where a figure changes annually, the year and the reporting source are named in the text. Names and roles that change over time, in particular the current masthead, should be verified on the Wiley journal page before being used for a submission decision. Fees for optional open-access publication, where offered, are likewise set by the publisher and are not fixed in this profile; consult the Wiley page for the current amount rather than relying on any third-party list.

In short, WIREs Climate Change occupies a specific and valuable niche: it is the place where the climate field explains itself to itself, across disciplines, in long peer-reviewed syntheses. For a reader who wants to understand a climate question properly, rather than merely to find the newest paper on it, few starting points are better designed for the job.