The bibliometric impact of books published by the International Consortium on Landslides

Dissemination of research results is an important part of basic as well as applied research if not the most important one. A large part of research results is published in scientific literature, and since there are many forms of it, the question arises which form is the most visible and attractive to the world scientific community. The International Consortium on Landslides (ICL), based in Kyoto, Japan, is one of the leading institutions in the field of landslide research and landslide risk reduction. On behalf of ICL, Springer Nature has published the journal Landslides: Journal of the International Consortium on Landslides since 2004. It is a very successful scientific journal with regard to its scientometric parameters. Since January 2018, it has been a monthly journal published in full color in electronic as well as printed form. Another form of dissemination of the ICL scientific and professional activities are published books in the form of monographs and proceedings from triennial World Landslide Forums. This paper discusses the impact of 52 books with 3426 chapters taken from the field of landslide science and published by Springer Nature from 2005 to 2018 in the earth sciences category, using different scientometric parameters, such as Bookmetrix downloads and citations, Scopus citations, Scopus h-index, Google citations, and Google h-index. The analysis was performed on the book chapter level (using mainly citations as the main scientometric parameter) as well as on the book level (using book h-index and percentage of cited chapters). Out of the selected 52 titles, 22 were published on behalf of the ICL, with 1419 chapters. The differences among landslide-related books can be quite large; only a few chapters from analyzed book titles were found to be cited frequently compared to highly cited scientific journal articles. On average, the analyzed 3426 book chapters from 52 landslide-related books have been downloaded since publication over 53,000 times each; 1092 chapters (32%) received 2932 citations (2.68 citations per cited chapter and 0.86 citations per published chapter). The analysis shows that the books published on behalf of the ICL are, together with other landslide-related book titles, on the forefront in the Springer eBook collection Earth and Environmental Science (EES). The selected 52 landslide-related book titles are above the average metrics for the whole EES with regard to the total number of downloads per book, the total number of citations per book, and the total number of readers per book. The ICL-related books are getting more downloads but less readers and citations (so far) as the selected non-ICL-related books. A way in raising the visibility and impact of the ICL books on landslide research community would be to support their open access publication in the form of e-Books as much as possible, and inclusion of ICL books into Web of Science.     

Landslides: A state-of-the art on the current position in the landslide research community

The international journal Landslides (ISSN 1612-510X), launched in 2004 and published by Springer Verlag, soon gained international recognition as the only specialized scientific journal in the world dedicated to different aspects of landslides, and as one of the leading world journals in the field of geological engineering. After 7 years, seven published volumes with 28 issues and 290 published papers on 2,794 pages, there is time to make a comparison with other related journals that also cover the field of landslide risk mitigation. The critical review of these seven publishing years was done using ISI Journal Citation Reports produced by Thomson Reuters, and available scientometric data from the ISI Web of Knowledge and SCOPUS. The data presented in this paper and the analysis shown may help the Editorial Board to further improve the journal into the direction of a high quality scientific journal with even higher impact on the international research community in the field of landslide risk mitigation.