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Environmental Impact Assessment Review

  • ISSN: 0195-9255

Editor-In-Chief: Xu

Next planned ship date: June 4, 2024

  • 5 Year impact factor: 6.8
  • Impact factor: 7.9

Environmental Impact Assessment Review (EIA Review) is a refereed, interdisciplinary journal serving a global audience of practitioners, policy-makers, regulators, academic… Read more

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June 4, 2024

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Environmental Impact Assessment Review (EIA Review) is a refereed, interdisciplinary journal serving a global audience of practitioners, policy-makers, regulators, academics and others with an interest in the field of impact assessment (IA) and management. Impact assessment is defined by the International Association for Impact Assessment (www.iaia.org) as the process of identifying the future consequences of a current or proposed action.

For EIA Review, the field of IA can be related to as the assessment of impacts on or of the environment (including, for example, EIA and SEA), social (SIA), health (HIA), risk (RIA), human rights, equity, language, technology, products, etc. With current or proposed actions, the EIA Review audience assesses how best to evaluate the impacts of policies, projects, processes and products, and how best to make decisions and undertake management activities.

The focus of EIA Review is on innovative theory and practice that encompasses any of the above mentioned impacts and activities. In other words, EIA Review covers the following topics (the list is not exhaustive):

• Development of IA theory and concepts;
• IA legislation, procedure and practice;
• IA Governance;
• IA Methods, for example, forecasting, indicators, systems-based approaches, ecosystem services assessment, cost benefit analysis, algorithms, network-based approaches, among others;
• Life Cycle Assessment, Carbon Footprinting, Energy Analysis, Emergy Analysis, and Integrated Product Policy;
• Environmental Management Systems.

Despite its name EIA Review is not restricted to review articles. However, it aims to publish only contributions that are innovative, topical and coherent and submissions are judged on these criteria by one of the editors, in consultation with an international advisory board. All submissions go through a blind peer-review process using a minimum of two reviewers prior to acceptance.

EIA Review does accept original research that might adopt a case study design or methodology, but it does not accept reports or descriptions solely of IA case studies that use existing methods (i.e. not innovative) in a single jurisdiction context with no wider learning points. Thus case studies are welcome where they explicitly demonstrate innovative theory or practice, and where there is a clear value to an international audience.

Authors are encouraged to consider recent articles in the journal to get a sense of how the editorial team judges potential manuscripts in terms of their innovation, contribution and approach.

Types of works accepted

The journal publishes six issues per year. The journal has three distinct sections (types of publications) and authors should indicate the appropriate section at the point of submission using the dropdown box:

• Articles
• Reviews of Current Literature
• Viewpoint

All submissions in any of these three sections are expected to present a message of interest to an international audience in addition to meeting the other criteria outlined above.

Articles are the most common form of submission and should reflect innovative theory and/or practice within the scope of the journal.

Reviews of current literature are welcomed where they consolidate current state of the art understanding related to some aspect of theory and/or practice, where they identify existing research gaps of interest to the IA community, or where they develop new theory. Articles and reviews of current literature are normally expected to be in the range 5,000-8,000 words in length (including tables, figures and reference lists). Word counts are not strictly imposed, but editors reserve the right to return articles (for shortening) which are considered to be overly long.

Viewpoints provide opportunities for practitioners to express their informed opinions. They are typically shorter submissions (2,000-4,000 words in length) that are contextually placed, and deliver broader understanding based on experience. As such, they are typically less systematic, more descriptive, but an important outlet for communicating wisdom. Evidence may be more anecdotal, but still needs to be placed in an international context to reflect the breadth of readership of the journal.