SHORT COMMUNICATION ANALYSIS OF GEOMORPHOLOGY CITATIONS IN THE LAST QUARTER OF THE 20TH CENTURY

Abstract

Three hundred and twenty-eight geomorphology articles published in the last quarter of the 20th century were cited 20 or more times in Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) indices, as of 15 May 2001. At the close of the 20th century, wellcited geomorphology is highly multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary with the most dominant fields being in biological, civil engineering, earth science, geography, geological, and soils disciplines. The very strong English-language bias of well-cited journal articles creates a geographical bias in study site selection, which may in turn bias geomorphic theory. Water-based research (fluvial processes and landforms, riparian, drainage basin) dominates well-cited papers, with the ‘hottest ’ subfield in the 1990s being riparian research with a biological emphasis. Over 90 journals publish well-cited papers, but Earth Surface Processes and Landforms hosts the largest number of well-cited papers. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. KEY WORDS: geomorphology; landform; earth surface processes; citation; bibliometric; temporal; time; trends Garfield first proposed a citation index for analysing scientific literature (Garfield, 1955), leading to the creation of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). Bibliometric analyses, filtered through the ISI database