Reflections from the <scp>Editor‐in‐Chief</scp> of <i>Groundwater Monitoring &amp; Remediation</i>

In 1981, to meet the demand for a publication with a specific focus on groundwater monitoring issues, Groundwater Monitoring & Review was established. The name was changed to Groundwater Monitoring & Remediation in 1993 in response to the increased groundwater remediation activity taking place at that time. Groundwater Monitoring & Remediation (GWMR) is one of three publications maintained by the National Groundwater Association (NGWA). The other two are Groundwater and the Well Water Journal. Each of these journals has a specific scope so their content does not significantly overlap. Since its inception, GWMR has had only four Editors-in-Chief: David Nielson (1981 to 1992), Michael Barcelona (1993 to 2002), Paul C. Johnson (2003 to 2011), and me, Neil R. Thomson (2012 to present). GWMR is unique in that it is a scholarly and professional publication with a primary mission to satisfy the needs of the NGWA membership for timely, high quality information. GWMR publishes many different types of peer-reviewed articles including cutting-edge technical articles and technical notes. These article types allow for a range of contributions that all lead to advances in the groundwater monitoring, management, and remediation fields. Today, GWMR is delivered to nearly 12,000 subscribers (individual and institution). In 2019, 55 articles were published, and articles from GWMR were downloaded approximately 42,000 times. The layout, featuring industry news, EPA updates, product and equipment news, and original columns authored by industry leaders, wrapped around technical papers is an excellent mix. This layout style is also employed by similar high quality publications in other water fields, such as the Journal American Water Works Association for the drinking water industry. As my term as Editor-in-Chief nears its end, I thought it would be worthwhile to share some of my observations over the last 9 years. While there are abundant data available, I have selected just a few areas that I thought might interest you. GWMR is published by Wiley, and as a result of their broad reach and differentiated sales strategies, GWMR content reaches the broadest possible audience worldwide. In addition to the approximately 5,000 members of the NGWA Scientists & Engineers Section who receive a copy of GWMR, about 7,000 institutions offered access to the latest content in GWMR in 2019. The distribution of institutions by region was Europe (46%), United States (10%), China (5%), Australia and New Zealand (2%), Japan (2%), United Kingdom (2%), Canada (1%), and other regions (32%). Since 2014 there has been an 87% increase in the number of full text downloads from GWMR as shown in Figure 1. The average year-over-year increase is about 13.5% which is clearly indicative of the shift to a paperless work environment and a heightened interest in GWMR content. In 2019 GWMR content was downloaded from more than 120 countries. This list includes noticeable downloads from countries such as Latvia, Bangladesh, Algeria, Ghana, Viet Nam, Zimbabwe, Iraq, Cameroon, Uzbekistan, and Honduras. The top 10 countries from which articles were full text downloaded in 2019 are illustrated in Figure 2. The United States had the most number of full text downloads at 40% of the total, followed by China (17%), Canada (8%), Brazil (4%), Australia (3%), United Kingdom (3%), Germany (3%), and then India, Netherlands and Italy at 2% each. The list of top 10 countries that have downloaded the most GWMR content has been relatively constant since 2013 with the exception of France and Taiwan which have appeared on this list occasionally. Table 1 lists the top five most downloaded GWMR articles in 2019, while Table 2 lists the top five most downloaded articles from 2012 to 2019. While the number of downloads of a specific article grows over time as interest in the contribution spreads, it is interesting to see sustained downloads for those articles that have a lasting contribution over multiple years as suggested by the first two articles in Tables 1 and 2. It is worth noting that GWMR has been an outlet for cutting-edge vapor intrusion articles, and three of these articles appear in Tables 1 and 2. A unique component of every GWMR issue is the Advances in Remediation Solutions column. The visionary and lead author of this column was Dr Suthan S. Suthersan, Chief Technical Officer and Executive Vice President of Arcadis North America, until his death in 2017. Since 2017 the lead author has been John Horst, Executive Director of Corporate Development and Innovation at Arcadis North America. The Advances in Remediation Solutions column provides timely and informative insight into emerging issues and novel remedial solutions. Recent columns have addressed the management of emerging contaminants, water treatment for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and nature based remediation. While the Advances in Remediation Solutions column is not peer-reviewed like cutting-edge technical articles and technical notes, this column is regularly downloaded suggesting that it is well read and valued by GWMR readers. Figure 3 shows the change in the number of water resources publications from 1997 to 2009. In 1997 there were only 44 journals publishing in the water resources domain and now there are 94 journals operating in this space. In addition to this nearly 115% increase in water resource journals over the last 12 years, there have been numerous advances in dissemination methods including open access, open data, discoverable personal and corporate websites, sharing platforms such as ResearchGate, and a host of direct to publication journals. While these changes provide an author with a multitude of options to share their research results and case studies, it does have an impact on submissions received by a specific journal. For example, the number of article submissions received by GWMR in 2019 was only 65% of the number of article submissions received in 2013. With just over 30% of the submitted articles being accepted, this marked decrease in submissions limits the number of quality articles appearing. Between 2013 and 2019, article submissions were received from more than 50 countries based on the corresponding author's country (Figure 4a). The bulk of these submissions was from the United States (35%), followed by China (13%), India (9%), Iran (7%), and Canada (6%). While the annual submission rate from most countries remained relatively constant between 2013 and 2019, there was a noticeable uptick in the submission rate from India and Iran in 2019 compared to 2013 suggesting an increased interest to publish in the groundwater monitoring space. Despite the broad range of countries submitting articles, the diversity of countries with articles published is much narrower (Figure 4b). Seventy percent (70%) of the articles published were from the United States, 10% from Canada, 4% from China, 2% from Australia, and less than 1% from Egypt, India, Iran, Pakistan, and Poland combined. One of the common metrics used to compare different journals within a certain field is the journal impact factor. The impact factor for a specific year (say 2019) is defined as the ratio of citations received in that year (2019) to the “citable items” published in the preceding 2 years (2018 and 2017). Figure 5 shows the GWMR impact factor from 2005 to 2019. Over this 15-year period the GWMR impact factor displays an increasing trend with plenty of variability. In the last 4 years it has maintained a value greater than 1.0. Most of the GWMR competitor journals have a slightly higher or near equal 2019 impact factor (e.g., Journal of Contaminant Hydrology [2.3], Water Air and Soil Pollution [1.9], and Journal of Environmental Engineering [1.3]). The fluctuating GWMR impact factor is related to published articles that just are not cited. We have tried to accept quality articles for publication to meet the expectations of the GWMR readers, and as a side effect increase the likelihood of citations. Increasing GWMR content with additional articles that will be less well-cited will cause the impact factor to decline. The top five most cited GWMR articles from 2012 to 2019 are listed in Table 3. While there is plenty of criticism on the validity of the impact factor as a measure of the importance of a journal, it has been widely accepted as a comparison metric. For academics there is a shift by some universities to use bibliometrics as an indication of the quality of research output and hence the bigger reward goes to those who, for example, publish in journals with higher impact factors. Since GWMR has a strong practical focus, the influence a technical paper has on day-to-day decisions made by remediation engineers or hydrogeologists is impossible to quantify, yet contributions may be highly impactful. Measuring this impact is obviously difficult since any citations in, say, technical reports are not captured in the GWMR impact factor. A surrogate measure of impact might be the number of article downloads. Figure 6 is a scatter plot of the top 40 cited articles from 2012 to 2019 versus their full text downloads. Clearly there is no correlation between the number of citations an article received and the number of full text downloads. The majority of these 40 articles are tightly clustered in a rectangle bounded between 10 and 20 total citations and less than 500 full text downloads. Surprising to me is that the GWMR article with the highest number of citations (indicated by A in Figure 6) was only downloaded 133 times, while the most downloaded article (indicated by B) has only been cited 22 times. Despite the limited data set I used to build Figure 6, the data indicate that citations and downloads are unrelated which suggests that other metrics, in addition to the impact factor, are sorely needed to quantify the impact of journals such as GWMR. If you are an author of a GWMR article, I strongly suggest that you promote your work so it becomes visible to all potential receptors. With the proliferation of water resource journals and other information sources combined with hectic work schedules it is important that your article gets noticed. Wiley provides some best-practice recommendations to help you boost your article's impact. If you are the reader of a GWMR article and find it impactful, please cite it appropriately if possible, or send a quick message to the author to let them know how you used their article. If you would like to submit an article and are not sure how to proceed I recommend that you reach out to the Editor-in-Chief with a brief outline of your thoughts. The technical content of articles appearing in GWMR is highly dependent on the authors who submit their work. I thank them for their contributions. The Associate Editors play an essential role in managing the peer-review and I am grateful for a job well done by these individuals. The success of a journal, in part, depends on receiving high quality and timely peer-reviews. A good peer-review requires a considerable amount of time and energy to construct, and I extend my thanks to those who have served as a GWMR reviewer. Finally, I would like to thank Thad Plumley, Director of Publications, National Ground Water Association who has always been extremely supportive and helpful, and to all the staff at John Wiley & Sons, Inc.; especially Allie Struzik, Hannah Smith, Fiona Sarne, Sari Friedman, and Steven Ottogalli. It has been my pleasure to serve as Editor-in-Chief for the past 9 years and I wish GWMR a vibrant and prosperous future as the premiere journal in the groundwater monitoring and remediation field. Stay safe,

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