Editors’ Vox is a blog from AGU’s Publications Department.
Reflections from outgoing Editor in Chief, Gabe Filippelli:
After five and a half years, 708 manuscripts, 12 special collections, and thousands of interactions with amazing authors and colleagues, my tenure as the Editor in Chief of GeoHealth comes to an end. As with all efforts that we contribute heart and soul to, I am both proud of “my baby” and sad to let it go.
One thing is clear to me—the entire field and practice of geohealth has grown up, thanks to huge efforts by editors, reviewers, and authors of GeoHealth submissions as well as the incredible work by the leadership of AGU’s GeoHealth Section and the excellent team at AGU and Wiley. I would like to ask your indulgence here in tolerating some brief musings of the retiree while I present some thoughts about the amazing opportunities that I see ahead for the GeoHealth journal and the field.
When I started as Editor in Chief in the middle of 2018, GeoHealth was receiving only about three manuscripts per month, although some months we had no submissions. Contrast with the past year, with an average of 15 submissions per month, with a maximum of 24 submissions in September 2023, and the growth of the journal is clear.
I think [the journal’s growth] is a reflection of the field itself, gaining footage and solidifying around an ever-increasing set of geohealth researchers—many of them early career scholars.
I don’t feel the large increase in submissions is simply due to the journal being indexed, achieving a high impact factor, and being a regular feature of media pieces. I think it is a reflection of the field itself, gaining footage and solidifying around an ever-increasing set of geohealth researchers—many of them early career scholars.
Building alongside the growth of the geohealth research community is a growth of funding (most notably some of the geohealth initiatives launched by the U.S. National Science Foundation), workshops, and academic program opportunities, as well as a large number of geohealth sessions and abstracts at AGU meetings. To this point, most of the submissions to the journal have been from the U.S., and there is not a parallel section within other science societies.
The urgency of acting on climate change, together with understanding its impacts on human health, has never been more apparent.
Additionally, the urgency of acting on climate change, together with understanding its impacts on human health, has never been more apparent. Now, with increasing attention being paid to the role of fossil fuel-sourced emissions and urban infrastructure on population health, we are beginning to quantify and truly realize the externalities of our energy and transportation choices in terms of real dollars, and human lives (Filippelli et al., 2021). Indeed, the emerging field of geohealth has documented some of those externality effects and many of them have appeared in the journal.
I personally would like to thank the thousands of reviewers who have dedicated their time and expertise to make GeoHealth publications as impactful as they are, the amazing team of Editors and Guest Editors who have framed the science that eventually gets published in GeoHealth, and the stellar staff at AGU, who were there to help with issues large and small, and to promote the journal through their outstanding work.
Forging Ahead – Aspirations from incoming Editor in Chief, Helen Nguyen:
I am immensely grateful and honored to succeed Dr. Filippelli. Being an author from the beginning of GeoHealth, I have seen how it grew into a major platform for authors working on the intersection of geoscience and human health.
I envision GeoHealth growing into new topics and spreading our wings to other countries.
With the editorial board and the GeoHealth Section, I envision GeoHealth growing into new topics (e.g., heat effects on human health, climate impacts on the exposome, green space, and health equity) and spreading our wings to other countries, especially low and middle-income countries. We are actively recruiting editors from these countries.
I am also working on establishing an early career editorial board of the rising stars who will be the future of GeoHealth. This board will be trained to gradually move into the editorial roles, which are more than finding reviewers and making publication decisions. If you are reading this article and are interested in serving on these two boards, please send me your CV (email address below).
In addition, the publication landscape is evolving fast like anything else. How can we keep authors, reviewers, and readers engaged? What is the role of technology, such as generative AI, in scholarly publication? How do we reach a broader audience outside the English-speaking scientific community, especially when nearly all geohealth research has societal impacts? These questions are the guiding principles for my service as Editor in Chief at GeoHealth. I strongly believe that together the geohealth community will grow into a major force in research and policy related to climate change adaptation and mitigation.
—Gabriel Filippelli (gfilippe@iu.edu, 
0000-0003-3434-5982), Indiana University Indianapolis, United States; and Helen Nguyen (thn@illinois.edu, 0000-0002-5461-5233 ), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, United States
