History of the journal

The journal has its long history as Roczniki Gleboznawcze and now as Soil Science Annual.

The Roczniki Gleboznawcze journal is one of the oldest soil science journals in Europe. It was created in 1949 by a resolution of the Main Board of the Soil Science Society of Poland, composed of: president – prof. Marian Górski, vice-presidents: prof. Feliks Terlikowski and prof. Tadeusz Włoczewski, treasurer – dr J. Krzysztofowicz, members: prof. A. Musierowicz and prof. B. Dobrzański. The first Editorial Committee was established. The Committee was formed by: Stanisław Bас (Wroclaw), Edward Chodzicki (Krakow), Marian Górski (Warsaw), Arkadiusz Musierowicz (Warsaw), Feliks Terlikowski (Poznan), and Tadeusz Włoczewski (Warsaw). The first volume of the Roczniki Gleboznawcze was published in February 1951 (dated as 1950).

From the beginning, the journal was published continuously as a hard copy (with a break in 1951 and 1953). In the years 1950–1958 one issue per year was published. Between 1959 and 1975 two or three (in exceptional cases four) issues per year were published. Since 1976, the Roczniki Gleboznawcze journal is a quarterly, but there were years when combined issues were published.

Since the beginning, the articles published in the Roczniki Gleboznawcze presented a high scientific level. They made a huge contribution both to the Polish and global soil science. The subject of the publication concerned, among others, such issues as: origin and classification of soil, regional soil science, valuation of soils, forest soils science, soil physics, soil chemistry, soil mineralogy, soil micromorphology, paleopedology, soil biology, agricultural chemistry, agricultural technology, soil tillage, water in soil, soil melioration, soil erosion, environmental protection of agriculture and forestry, soil pollution, history and present state of soil science.

The basic language of publication between 1950 and 2012 was Polish. Only some articles, and sometimes the whole issues were published in English. Each non-English article had an abstract in English (sometimes also in German, French or other language), and until 1992 also in Russian.

In the Roczniki Gleboznawcze, the Polish bibliographical lists of soil science, agricultural chemistry, tillage and water economy were published every year. The lists were initially collected by Michał Strzemski, later they were prepared by Henryk Pondel (since 1960), followed by Halina Jakubczyk (2001 and 2002). From time to time, the papers and communications presented at scientific conferences were published in the form of separate issues. Moreover, some issues were published in order to commemorate Polish soil scientists and agricultural chemists (including S. Miklaszewski, M. Górski, A. Musierowicz, and J. Tomaszewski). Furthermore, almost all classifications of Polish soils (from 1959, 1974, 1989, and 2011) were published in the Roczniki Gleboznawcze, except for the first one, which was published in 1956 in the Polish Agricultural Annual journal.

In 2012, the journal started to cooperate with the Versita publisher (from 2014 the De Gruyter company, and then Sciendo). The aim of this cooperation has also been to make the Roczniki Gleboznawcze better recognizable journal worldwide, including the registration in international scientific databases. The cooperation with Sciendo was finished in 2019.

In 2013, the Roczniki Gleboznawcze has changed its name to the Soil Science Annual. From this year, the journal has new ISSN (2300-4967) and e-ISSN (2300-4975) numbers. At that time, English became the primary language of publication in the journal.

In 2014, the digitization of archival issues of the Roczniki Gleboznawcze published between 1950 and 2011 was accomplished. Thereby we managed to convert all previous issues into digital form (each article is now available free of charge as a PDF file on http://ssa.ptg.sggw.pl/issues). In summer 2014, a website of the Soil Science Annual http://ssa.ptg.sggw.pl/ was launched. The digitization of archival issues and creating the website was possible thanks to the project entitled “Granting the international character of the Roczniki Gleboznawcze journal published by the Soil Science Society of Poland”, financed by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education under the “Index Plus” programme.

In 2016 and 2017 the journal was first indexed in SCOPUS and Emerging Sources Citation Index (Web of Science) databases, respectively.

The editors of the Roczniki Gleboznawcze (and later Soil Science Annual) were, successively: Marian Górski (1950), Kazimierz Starzyński (1950–1957), Władysław Trzciński (1957–1989), Krystyna Konecka-Betley (1990–1999), Elżbieta Janowska (2000–2007) oraz Danuta Czępińska-Kamińska (2008–2013), and Łukasz Uzarowicz (2013–2015). From 2015 to the present, the editor-in-chief is Józef Chojnicki.