• Journal of the Korean earth science society
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• v.35 no.7
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• pp.562-571
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• 2014

In the celebration of the $50^{th}$ anniversary of the Korean Earth Science Society, the whole articles published in Journal of the Korean Earth Science Society (JKESS) were quantitatively analyzed. JKESS has played a major role in exchanging academically among earth science education specialists and in educating next generation for the last 36 years since it was founded in 1979. The total number of 1544 articles in thirty five volumes about the earth sciences and the earth science pedagogy has been published by August, 2014, and the number of the yearly published articles has been increasing. Regarding the research area, 69.3% was published in earth sciences and the other 30.7% was in earth science education; the percentage of research articles in geology, atmospheric science, environmental science, oceanography, and astronomy was 55.2, 17.6, 16.0, 6.0, and 5.2%, respectively. The number of research articles on atmospheric science and environmental science has recently been increasing, whereas, earth science education research articles have been" decreasing, which was similar to the pattern seen fifteen years ago. We thought that one of the reasons was related to a new journal named, "Journal of the Korean Society of Earth Science Education" started to publish in December, 2008. The number of articles authored or co-authored with foreigner scholars was totaled 53, which is only 3.4% of the entire number of published articles. It suggests that international advertisement via public relations as well as the development of English homepage be necessary. In order to become an excellent registered academic journal, it is the time to comprehensively discuss how to improve both the quality growth and the quantity of JKESS. According to the Ministry of Education, it is now in its planning stage to convert the current registration system of the academic journals to the autonomous evaluation system in academia. Therefore, we recommend that Journal of the Korean Earth Science Society be prepared for the upcoming future change.