An Informetric Profile of Water Resources Management Literatures

The main purpose of this paper is to evaluate the global performance and to assess the current trends in research of water resource management. The methods of informetric analysis were used to survey water resource management related articles in the Science Citation Index (SCI) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) during the past decades. The publication records, subjects, journals, countries, institutes, authors, citations and keywords were analyzed respectively for each paper. The number of papers related to water resource management in 2012 was approximately 8 times that of the year 2000 and hundreds of times more than early 1990s. Water resource management related papers were distributed unevenly by countries. The USA, P.R. China, Australia and UK were the top contributing countries, also present normalized by dividing with population that published most SCI papers as well as SSCI papers. The largest water resource management research center is located in the USA according to the number of publications and citations, with P.R. China becoming more proficient in water resource management according to the data from country and institute. In addition, the quality of papers produced by developed countries is more advanced than developing countries. All these efforts contributed to the indication in trends of water resource management research on a global scale. Earlier water resource management research appeared and was originally concentrated on engineering, irrigation and geography. Issues gradually transferred to management, economics and regime recently. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013