Energy & Environment is a peer-reviewed

Peer review

Peer review is a process of self-regulation by a profession or a process of evaluation involving qualified individuals within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards, improve performance and provide credibility...

 academic journal

Academic journal

An academic journal is a peer-reviewed periodical in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as forums for the introduction and presentation for scrutiny of new research, and the critique of existing research...

 aimed at natural scientists, technologists, and the international social science and policy communities covering the direct and indirect environmental impacts of energy acquisition, transport, production and use. Its editor-in-chief since 1996 is Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen

Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen

Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, Ph.D. is an Emeritus Reader in Geography at the University of Hull in Kingston-upon-Hull England where she taught environmental policy and politics. She was born in Dresden, East Germany then moved to Adelaide, South Australia where she obtained a research degree in...

. Contributors have included David Henderson

David Henderson (economist)

David Henderson is an economist. He was the Head of the Economics and Statistics Department at the OECD in 1984–1992. Before that he worked as an academic economist in Britain, first at Oxford and later at University College London ; as a British civil servant David Henderson (born 1927)...

, Richard Tol

Richard Tol

Richard S. J. Tol is a Research Professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin, Ireland, where he works in the research areas of energy economics and environmental economics...

, and Gary Yohe

Gary Yohe

Gary Wynn Yohe is the Woodhouse/Sysco Professor of economics at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, and Director of the John E. Andrus Public Affairs Center at Wesleyan. He holds a PhD from Yale University....

.

Abstracting and indexing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in the ISI Social Sciences Citation Index

Social Sciences Citation Index

Social Sciences Citation Index is an interdisciplinary citation index product of Thomson Reuters' Healthcare & Science division. It was developed by the Institute for Scientific Information from the Science Citation Index....

, Scopus

Scopus

Scopus, officially named SciVerse Scopus, is a bibliographic database containing abstracts and citations for academic journal articles. It covers nearly 18,000 titles from over 5,000 international publishers, including coverage of 16,500 peer-reviewed journals in the scientific, technical, medical,...

 (from 1995 onwards), EBSCO databases

EBSCO Publishing

EBSCO Publishing, headquartered in Ipswich, Massachusetts, is an aggregator of premium full-text content. EBSCO Publishing's core business is providing online databases via EBSCOhost to libraries worldwide. EBSCOhost is used by libraries, schools, academic institutions, medical institutions, and...

, Current Contents

Current Contents

Current Contents is a rapid alerting service database from the Institute for Scientific Information, now part of Thomson Reuters, that is published online and in several different printed subject sections.-History:...

/Social & Behavioral Sciences, and Compendex

Compendex

Compendex, the computerized version of the Engineering Index, is a comprehensive engineering bibliographic database. Compendex is an index of engineering materials started in 1884, compiled by hand under the original title of Engineering Index. As Compendex it is now published by Elsevier. The...

.

Criticism

According to an article in The Guardian

The Guardian

The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...

, Gavin Schmidt

Gavin Schmidt

Gavin A. Schmidt is a climatologist and climate modeler at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. He works on the variability of the ocean circulation and climate, using general circulation models . He has also worked on ways to reconcile paleo-data with models...

 (of RealClimate

RealClimate

RealClimate is a commentary site on climatology. The site's contributors are a group of climate scientists whose goal is to provide a quick response to developing stories and providing the context sometimes missing in mainstream commentary. The discussion is intended to be restricted to scientific...

) and Roger A. Pielke, Jr. claim that E&E has had low standards of peer review and little impact.

Boehmer-Christiansen acknowledges that the journal's "impact rating has remained too low for many ambitious young researchers to use it", but blames this on "the negative attitudes of the IPCC

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a scientific intergovernmental body which provides comprehensive assessments of current scientific, technical and socio-economic information worldwide about the risk of climate change caused by human activity, its potential environmental and...

/CRU

Climatic Research Unit

The Climatic Research Unit is a component of the University of East Anglia and is one of the leading institutions concerned with the study of natural and anthropogenic climate change....

people."

Climate change skepticism

When asked about the publication of skeptical papers Boehmer-Christiansen said, "I'm following my political agenda -- a bit, anyway. But isn't that the right of the editor?"

Boehmer-Christiansen explained her "political agenda" in a post to an article at the "Carbon Brief" website criticizing Energy & Environment, "My political agenda for E&E is not party political but relates to academic and intellectual freedom. I am an geographer turned international relations specialist (environment as special field) and as such have long been critical of environmentalist exaggerations. I have observed and recorded 'scare mongering' effects utilised by politics on policy and economic competition since the early 1980s. I now believe that in a subject as new, complex and poorly understood as climate science and climate history over geologic time - which I studied as a physical geographer and geomorphologist in Australia - all voices should be published and debated. However, the opposite happened once the climate research, with help of the IPCC and the WMO became de facto servants of global and EU energy ambitions."