On November 21, 2011, the editorial office of Journal of Arid Land (JAL) received an E-mail from Mr. Rob Northrup, the Content Acquisitions Specialist of Cambridge Science Abstracts (CSA) in the USA  and Mr. Rob Northrup said that JAL has been assessed by CSA and officially begun abstracting and indexing some issues.

CSA is an important international abstract search engine with the rapid development and high international impact in recent years. It provides seamless access to and navigation of myriad digital pages of the world's scholarship, delivering it to the desktop and into the workflow of serious researchers in multiple fields, from arts, literature, social science to science, technology, and medicine.

Since launching in 2009, JAL has insisted on a professional and international development path, actively tracked the international research hotspots in arid areas, quickly improved the academic levels and quality of the journal, and raised its international impact. Now, JAL has been abstracted/indexed internationally by SCIE, Current Contents/Agriculture, Biology & Environmental Sciences, and Cambridge Science Abstracts in America, VINITI Abstracts Journal (РЖ) in Russia, Index Copernicus in Poland, and Ulrich's Periodicals Directory in the USA.