GJI was formed by a complex series of mergers between previous geophysical journals. Its origins can be traced to 1919, when the RAS absorbed the Geophysical Committee (which had previously been part of the
British Association), thereby becoming the learned society responsible for British geophysics. This led to an increase in the number of geophysical papers being published in the
Monthly Notices of the RAS (MNRAS). In 1922 it was decided to separate the geophysical papers from those on astronomy, by issuing the
Geophysical Supplement to Monthly Notices. These were not published on a regular schedule, but instead issued whenever a sufficient number of geophysical papers were ready for publication, and distributed to MNRAS subscribers. This arrangement continued for several decades, until the
International Geophysical Year of 1957-58 brought renewed attention to the subject. This prompted the RAS to convert the supplements to a separate journal, which began publishing in 1958 as
Geophysical Journal. In 1970, it established an office in the United States to handle the increasing number of submissions from North America. Meanwhile in Germany, the DGG was founded in 1922 and in 1924 began publishing the
German language journal
Zeitschrift für Geophysik ( Journal for Geophysics). From 1954 it was published in partnership with
Physica-Verlag. In 1973 the publisher was acquired by
Springer Verlag, who began including papers in English and changed the journal's name to the bilingual
Journal of Geophysics – Zeitschrift für Geophysik. When the EGS merged into the
European Geosciences Union in 2002, the new body decided not to continue involvement with GJI, leaving it under the control of the RAS and DGG, == Abstracting and indexing ==