JAWRA—Looking ahead

In the capacity of the recently appointed Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American Water Resources Association (JAWRA), I would like to outline some of the issues, challenges and opportunities that are in my opinion going to be relevant to this journal in the foreseeable future. I would also like to comment on possible ways of meeting some of these challenges, ensuring that the journal continues its long and successful tradition of communicating the highest quality research.

JAWRA, one of the earliest journals on water resources and hydrology, began in 1965 as the Water Resources Bulletin, which was changed to its present name in 1997. Its long history and several decades of experience in publishing state-of-the-art research and applications made this journal highly regarded and recognized among water resources researchers and practitioners worldwide. To maintain its status and prominence in the future and to leverage its past excellence in producing highly impactful research, the journal needs to continue sustaining its visibility, attracting top-quality manuscripts and ensuring the highest professional standards of manuscript review and processing.

We are all witnessing the exponential rate of the accelerating change of history, driven primarily by technological innovations. For most of today's scientists, it is hard to comprehend that only several decades ago, the internet did not exist. Without search engines and databases, it is hard to imagine scientists who would wait for weeks or even months to receive a copy of a desired journal paper, only to read it and realize that another paper should have been ordered. The internet enabled scientists to transition from traditional extensive procedures to the modern-day efficient processes to search, communicate and collaborate more effectively, producing publications at a much faster rate than before. Moreover, by transitioning to open access and using social media, journals are reaching wider audiences beyond those limited to academic and government agencies, eventually leading to a broader readership and a higher impact. All these changes arguably redefined the publication arena, pressing journals to adopt new practices and standards in the transition to cope with the changes. It remains to be seen if, and to what degree, the emerging artificial intelligence-based tools are going to affect the publication processes. Despite all these changes, the key norms such as research novelty, integrity, and ethics continue to be paramount for JAWRA.

Along with the technological advances, an increasing globalization has been progressing for decades, clearly and strongly affecting the research and publishing, facilitating communication and collaborations and resulting in research products well beyond what was possible only a few decades earlier. While it is hard to predict the societal, technological, research and other future trends with confidence, some of those changes, nonetheless, appear likely to perpetuate in the future. The increasing impact of the emerging societies such as India, probably already the most populous country in the world, China, which is rapidly moving from emerging to a fully emerged society, Brazil, Ethiopia, and Iran is already evident. These still largely untapped sources of human and institutional potential will make a significant contribution to science in future decades. Being cognizant of the incoming intellectual powerhouses and “markets,” this journal should be well positioned to serve the readership by communicating the worldwide scientific achievements by presenting water issues in such regions and describing approaches to resolve them. The opportunities are immense.

The review process of incoming manuscripts is another area that has been evolving through time in various ways and is likely to continue doing so. The process relies on the team of associate editors (AEs), recognized scientists who contribute their time and expertise to keep this journal going. AEs, along with a large base of reviewers, are the most valuable asset of this journal. Without them it would not be possible to achieve JAWRA aims and mission. It is our obligation to acknowledge their work and maintain the depth and diversity of the multi-disciplinary expertise of the Editorial Board. With a goal to increase the quality and number of submittals, special attention should be given to making the manuscript review process more efficient. Reduced turnaround times and other measures to streamline the process will further improve and optimize the journal review and publication procedures.

In the scientific community, journals are typically compared and ranked using the journal impact factor (JIF) (Garfield, 2006), which is often used as a proxy to a journal's importance in its field. For each journal, the JIF is calculated for every year as the number of citations received for articles published in the two previous years divided by the total number of articles published in the same 2 years (in 2022, the JIF for JAWRA was equal to 2.4). While it provides a simple way to evaluate journals, many scientists highlight its weaknesses (DePellegrin & Johnston, 2015; Werner, 2015). Seglen (1997) states that JIFs are determined by technicalities unrelated to scientific quality of the articles. Even the JIF inventor E. Garfield recognized its limitations. “Informed and careful use of these impact data is essential. Users may be tempted to jump to ill-informed conclusions based on impact factor statistics unless several caveats are considered” (Garfield, 1994). It is understood that ignoring the weaknesses of JIF data and using measures such as JIF or a more recent CiteScore (Teixeira da Silva, 2020) helps publishers promote their journals. On the other hand, it is necessary to avoid overemphasizing these metrics (Cobb et al., 2018) and maintain the focus on professionalism, knowledge, integrity, and continuous improvement in manuscript review and processing procedures and practices.

According to its scope, “JAWRA papers present ideas derived from multiple disciplines woven together to give insight into a critical water issue, or are based primarily upon a single discipline with important applications to other disciplines.” JAWRA's orientation on theoretical and applied water resources-related research has drawn a majority of papers from academic institutions in the United States and worldwide. In addition, JAWRA also attracted a significant number of manuscripts submitted by federal, state and local agencies, and even from industry. Approximately one-fourth of the Editorial Board members represent governmental research groups, which is comparable with a relatively large portion of manuscripts submitted by authors from government agencies. These ties ensure journal uniqueness and are an important contributor to the journal brand and prestige. A good balance between publishing a more theoretical work and applied research with a strong international presence seems to be a winning formula that has provided a niche for this journal in the past and may as well be its blueprint for the future.