Reflections on the State of the Journal

In 2011, the number of manuscripts published in JHE has burgeoned to 168 without a significant change in the 5-year average acceptance rate of papers. That represents a 46% increase in the number of manuscripts published relative to 2010. New manuscripts in 2011 are pouring in at an average rate of about 30 per month along with another 25–30 revisions per month.

Detecting trends in research areas is not straightforward, but my own observation is that the subjects of instrumentation and evaluation of instrumentation error, turbulence interaction with a moveable sediment bed and the resulting initiation of sediment motion, transients in water distribution systems and storm sewer surcharges, and flow resistance of vegetation have been particularly fertile recently. This list is a subjective impression only and by no means comprehensive. Papers that combine experimental data and the latest three-dimensional turbulence modeling techniques remain at the forefront of acquiring a new understanding of the practical implications of turbulence in hydraulic engineering, not only in terms of bridge scour but also with respect to hydraulic structures, for example.

The 2011 ASCE Environmental and Water Resources Institute (EWRI) Congress was held in Palm Springs, California, in May. Awards were given for the best technical paper (Hilgard Prize), best technical note, and best discussion (Stevens Award) published in JHE for the period June 30, 2009, to July 1, 2010. The award winners are selected by appointed subcommittees whose members come from the editorial board. The Hilgard Prize this year was awarded to Gokhan Kirkil, George Constantinescu, and Rob Ettema for their paper entitled “Detached Eddy Simulation Investigation of Turbulence at Circular Pier with Scour Hole” (Kirkil et al. 2009). The Best Technical Note Award went to Brian Younkin and David Hill for their technical note entitled “Rapid Profiling of an Evolving Bed Form Using Planar Laser Sheet Illumination” (Younkin and Hill 2009). Finally, the Stevens Award for best Discussion, which is limited to ASCE members, was given to James Ball for his discussion of the paper “Automatic Calibration of the U.S. EPA SWMM Model for a Large Urban Catchment” (Ball 2009). Congratulations to these deserving award winners!

In addition to listing all reviewers for 2011 in the December issue of JHE, a new award for outstanding reviewers for the year has been instituted. They are recognized on the ASCE JHE website (http://ascelibrary.org/hyo/). The 2010 outstanding reviewers are Zhixian Cao, Wuhan University; Pierre Julien, Colorado State University; Heidi Nepf, MIT; Giuseppe Oliveto, University of Basilicata; Colin D. Rennie, University of Ottawa; and Brett Sanders, University of California. Another addition to the JHE website is the featured article of the month selected by the Editor and shown in the right-hand column of the journal web page under “Research Highlights.”

Although it is not a journal award, I would like to extend our congratulations to one of our Associate Editors, Emeritus Professor Jacques Delleur of Purdue University, for winning one of the prestigious EWRI Lifetime Achievement Awards. The award is presented to members who are judged to have advanced the profession, exhibited technical competence, and significantly contributed to public service, research, or practice in the environmental and water resources profession. The award plaque states that Jacques W. Delleur, D.Eng.Sc., P.E., M.ASCE received this award “In recognition of his lifelong and eminent contribution to the environmental and water resources engineering disciplines through practice, research, and public service.”

In 2011, we added three new Associate Editors to our cadre to further augment the exceptional quality of the editorial board. Professor Panos Diplas, Ph.D., M.ASCE, of Virginia Tech (Fig. 1) has graciously accepted an invitation to return to the editorial board after an interim period of a few years since his last stint as an AE (1994–2001); he also served as co-guest editor for the special issue of JHE published in December 2010. Dr. Diplas received his B.S. degree from the Technical University of Greece, M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Minnesota, and was a postdoctoral associate at the University of Iowa before joining the faculty at Virginia Tech. In spring of 2011, I had the privilege of visiting with Dr. Diplas at his laboratory and meeting his impressive group of graduate students. I did not realize until recently that the late Jack Kennedy, who was my Ph.D. adviser at Iowa, also served as postdoctoral adviser to Dr. Diplas, albeit some considerable number of years later! Dr. Diplas has been working in the research areas of bridge scour, initiation of sediment motion, and flow through vegetation in recent years.

I am pleased that Professor Colin Rennie (Ph.D., P.Eng., M.ASCE) has agreed to become an AE for the journal. He is an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Ottawa, where he is also director of the Civil Engineering Hydraulics Laboratory. Professor Rennie (Fig. 2) carries out research in the areas of river engineering, environmental hydraulics, sediment transport, turbulence, and aquatic habitat. He pioneered the use of acoustic Doppler current profilers (aDcps) for measurement of bedload transport. I shared an enjoyable field trip with Dr. Rennie in conjunction with the Third International Conference on Scour and Erosion in Amsterdam in 2006. We took a train ride along with Jeff Conaway of the U.S. Geological Survey to visit the world-famous Delft Hydraulics Laboratory.

Dr. Lyle Zevenbergen, Ph.D., P.E., M.ASCE, brings a unique mix of science and practical engineering to our editorial board (Fig. 3). He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in civil engineering from Colorado State University and a Ph.D. in earth science from Queen Mary College, University of London. As an engineer and scientist at Ayres Associates in Fort Collins, Colorado, Dr. Zevenbergen has been responsible for numerous engineering projects requiring computer modeling of hydraulics, hydrology, scour, erosion, and sediment transport. Dr. Zevenbergen is a contributor to the Federal Highway Administration Manual HEC-18 (Richardson and Davis 2001), which is currently under revision, and a coauthor of HEC-23 (Lagasse et al. 2009), among several other scour-related manuals. While Dr. Zevenbergen and I have known each other for some time through various scour forums, we recently participated together in a national project on the evaluation of research needs related to scour at bridge foundations.

We welcome these new Associate Editors to our board. I look forward to working with them in the years to come.

Alas, we have lost one AE this year, Dr. Vladimir Nikora, University of Aberdeen, who was the winner of the 2010 Hunter Rouse Lecture Award. Dr. Nikora is the new Chief Editor of the Journal of Hydraulic Research (JHR); our loss is certainly their gain! We wish him well in this new endeavor.

While much has been accomplished in recent years with the JHE, we have many challenges ahead. Some of these challenges were discussed in the meeting of JHE Associate Editors at the 2011 EWRI Congress.

The proliferation of open journals and other methods of communicating research results in social media provide alternative models to the current peer-review system, which might be viewed as stodgy by some observers. Balancing criteria of high quality and fairness simultaneously with demands for quick turnaround times is no easy task. My own view is that we cannot compromise the first two criteria in order to satisfy the third. Somehow we must achieve all three, but that may require a reconsideration of the present structure of the purely volunteer peer-review system in the future to make it more nimble and responsive to author needs. In the meantime, we are continuing to strive to reduce turnaround times; I hope that reviewers and authors alike can assist us in this effort.

The issues of more robust uncertainty analysis and model validation were discussed in the AE meeting for both experiments and numerical models, and it was generally agreed that these practices should be strongly encouraged. Excellent guidelines for analysis of uncertainty in experiments and numerical models can be found at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) website for the Journal of Fluids Engineering (http://journaltool.asme.org/Content/JournalDescriptions.cfm?journalId=9&Journal=FE). Perhaps even a formal policy concerning uncertainty analysis might be considered for the future.

One of the most important responsibilities of AEs and the Editor is to monitor and improve the quality of the Journal, although reviewers and authors themselves obviously play an important role in that process. Discussion at the AE meeting centered around the use (and misuse) of the Thompson-Reuters Web of Knowledge journal impact factor. The impact factor has a built-in time delay that obscures its current probative value. For this reason, ASCE has suggested the use of the 5-year impact factor. The issue of self-citation is also considered through publication of a separate impact factor not including self-citations. In my view, we should also go beyond the statistics and enunciate our own evaluations of the quality of journal articles as authors, reviewers, and editors; as nominators for awards; as writers of discussions and forum articles; and as experts expressing opinions in our own academic and professional organizations.

For the immediate future, a number of projects are on the drawing board for JHE involving special issues and invited papers that you will be hearing about shortly. My goal is to expand the horizon of hydraulic engineering in terms of the breadth of article subject areas while maintaining our core of specialty knowledge that is also rapidly developing. Invited papers are one means to that end that I am working on. I welcome your suggestions either as e-mails or even thoughtful forum articles on the issues that we are facing as hydraulic engineers in the 21st century. Be sure to let me know when you see an issue of JHE that is “the best ever!”