Progress reports

TL;DR: Progress reports are short, but relatively frequent updates on developments in physical geography, providing continuous updates across the field.

Abstract: In browsing through Progress in Physical Geography (PiPG), you may have noticed that some articles are labeled as ‘progress reports’, and wondered how these articles differ from the rest of the review articles. This editorial will try to provide some background regarding progress reports, their characteristics, and their role in this journal. This is an opportune time to discuss progress reports, as this issue of PiPG marks a transition from typically just one to two progress reports per issue. As the name implies, progress reports are a mechanism to provide short, but relatively frequent, updates on developments in different areas of physical geography, thus balancing the major, but necessarily less frequent, reviews in the regular papers in the journal. In the past, some progress reports were as long as regular articles, but the current target is for manuscripts around 3000 words. To ensure breadth across the range of physical geography, the contributions are commissioned from leading scholars. As invited articles, progress reports carry with them some prestige. To ensure continuity in the material between years, each author agrees to write three progress reports. Generally, these reports have been published annually, forming a sequence of three, linked articles. The authors of progress reports are given considerable latitude in defining the scope of their three articles. Some authors choose to review only the most recent publications, thus providing three sequential and contemporary views of progress in the same area. Others choose to provide a series of articles on separate, somewhat narrowly focused topics, so that the articles are thematically, rather than temporally linked. This linking ideally extends from the authors’ individual contributions to the broader coverage in the journal. Thus, a key element of progress reports is that the articles as a whole provide continuous updates across the field of physical geography. Progress reports, like all review papers, necessarily require the author to be selective and to use expert judgment in identifying both the trends in the discipline to focus on, and the articles to discuss. Indeed, the advice the PiPG website offers to prospective authors is equally relevant to progress reports: ‘Authors need not be uncritically exhaustive in synthesizing research on a particular topic, but should concentrate on what they consider to be the most promising recent productive trends and developments which are likely to be transformative’ (SAGE, 2011). Progress reports are also a feature of our sister journal, Progress in Human Geography (PiHG). Progress reports in PiHG are invited papers written by leading researchers chosen from across the main subfields of the discipline relevant to the journal. Unlike PiPG’s progress