In my second year as Editor, I find myself taking a greater interest in H-indices. How are they calculated, what affects them, and how can I improve mine? Pawing over the Web of Science output, the conclusion finally became clear to me that the papers now starting to affect my H-index are based on work I initiated more than a decade ago. How did this time pass? Having had my research training in the 1980s, I expected to publish papers only after my PhD, with well-formed ideas and complete data. Add another year to extract text and/or diagrams from busy ex-PhDs and ten years can easily be accounted for. Glancing through the latest issues of the major journals, I was shocked to see that the time from receipt to appearing in print was, on average, two years, with some taking up to four. It is, then, at least five years for a paper to have an impact on my H-index (two of which are waiting to be cited by others). Following this traditional route, can I further influence my H-Index before I retire?
It is hard to believe that, my own work aside, the present pace of engineering research and publication is of benefit to our science. Clearly there are many of us that need to be more imaginative in thinking about how, why and where we publish. The traditional route may be rigorous but it risks stifling progress and ossifying soil mechanics. And when we compare with how other disciplines publish, the case for the fresh approach of Géotechnique Letters seems overwhelming, allowing rapid online publication of shorter papers, often of work in progress.
At the end of our first year, I think that you will agree that the quality of papers in our first volume is impressive; these are all available free online (www.geotechniqueletters.com), and will shortly be available as a package. This free internet access means that, from scratch, we have had readers in forty-nine countries. The success of the journal is in no small part due to the untiring efforts of our panel, which must be one of the most international of any major journal with nine different countries represented in a panel of thirteen. Our monthly meetings are held by teleconference/internet, which can mean some very late nights and early mornings coping with time zones from the eastern USA right around to Japan. We are, as ever, indebted to the hard work of the publisher, whose patience in explaining the complexities of internet-based publishing has not flagged. For example, a current topic of debate is what exactly we mean by an ‘issue’. Since our papers are simply published online as quickly as they are ready, any grouping of papers seems purely artificial, and is really just an inherited artefact of hard-copy based publishing. Needless to say, there is pressure to have issues, often from indexes/journal databases that are (ironically) themselves web based.
The New Year 2012 promises to be another one of innovation for Géotechnique Letters, with an online discussion community recently established on LinkedIn by Jean-Michel Pereira. Please do join it to hear first of new papers, read opinion pieces and to share items of interest such as lecture web links. It was here that we first announced the themed ‘issue’ for 2012, ‘Geomechanics across the scales’, which is being led by Itai Einav and Boris Jeremić.
Online publication is such a new, and I believe important, enterprise for the future of geotechnical engineering that I would encourage you all to get involved and help decide its direction. Please do not hesitate to contact me with your ideas; any solution to the ‘issue’ conundrum would be especially welcome!
