Abstract
The first issue of the Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology (QJEG) was published in 1967; the journal gained the strapline Encompassing Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology in 1979, and later became the Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology (QJEGH). The papers published in the journal cover all aspects of engineering geological and hydrogeological research and practice, and include some important cases studies as well as more fundamental papers. As the journal approaches its 50th anniversary, both 50 years and 50 volumes, this paper reviews that first half-century and acts as an introduction to a following series of review papers that will deal with the contribution of QJEGH papers to each of several important disciplines within the general ambit of the journal.
The intent behind the journal Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology (QJEG) was well expressed by Richey (1967) in his Foreword to the first issue:The adventure of starting a new scientific journal is associated in the present case with the interest involved in bringing together two of the great practical sciences of creative value for mankind. Geology and engineering, and geologists and engineers, have for a long time now been more or less closely associated in the British Isles and elsewhere … .
This association reflects the engineering geological content of the journal, but it is important to note that the association with the science of hydrogeology and with hydrogeologists has been equally strong since the very earliest of volumes and is, of course, reflected in the current name of the journal: the Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology (QJEGH).
Papers published in the first half-century of the QJEGH cover all aspects of engineering geological and hydrogeological research and practice, and include important case studies as well as dealing with more fundamental issues in the science. Outside the UK and some Commonwealth countries, many of these important papers appear to have fallen ‘under the radar’ of the wider international audience (Bromhead et al. 2012), notwithstanding the international range of their subject matter.
In common with other Geological Society journals, the QJEGH has adopted the short review format pioneered by the Journal of the Geological Society, and to commemorate the 50th anniversary of this journal, a series of such reviews of content are to be published, although some of the invited authors have chosen the more conventional research paper format for their material. This review is offered as an introduction to that series of subject-specific reviews that follow in this and subsequent volumes.
The QJEGH is available in digital form, along with the Geological Society of London's (GSL) book series and other journals, either published or owned by GSL, in the form of the Lyell Collection (http://www.lyellcollection.org/), and it is abstracted in:
Current Contents;
ASCA;
Science Citation Index;
Groundwater On-Line;
Geological Abstracts;
International Civil Engineering Abstracts;
Geotechnical Abstracts;
GeoArchive;
GeoRef;
Geobase.
Origins and history
The Geological Society of London was inaugurated in November 1807, and has grown from strength to strength over the past two centuries. It moved to its present apartments in Burlington House (constructed c. 1731) in 1874.
The first known use of the term ‘engineering geology’ was in 1879 when a series of nine articles was published by Henry Penning (e.g. Penning 1879) in The Engineer, predating the first juxtaposed use of the words ‘engineering’ and ‘geology’ in Russian by some 6 years. Penning's articles were followed by a textbook on the same subject just a year later (Penning 1880). The word ‘hydrogeology’ was, in contrast, first used by Joseph Lucas in 1874 and defined in his 1877 paper (Mather 2001). Notwithstanding this, Lamarck used the term ‘hydrogéologie’ in his 1802 book (Lamarck 1802), but in the context of the influence of water on the surface of the Earth (hydrology) rather than that of groundwater (A. Charalambous, pers. comm.).
The Engineering Group of the Geological Society (EGGS) was founded in 1964 as the Society refocused its role and activities as an umbrella organization for emerging sub-disciplines in geology. In 1966, a proposal for the development of a journal devoted to engineering geology was put to the Group by the Society's ruling Council. Additionally, when Rudolph Glossop, the Chair of EGGS at the time, had helped to establish Géotechnique 20 years earlier, one of the aims was to provide a vehicle for publishing papers on engineering geology. However, with both the rapid expansion of Géotechnique and the technical direction it took, it was agreed that a new journal was required (Williams & Norbury 2008), the implication being that engineering geology was being sidelined within the pages of Géotechnique.
The first issue of the QJEG was dated 20 September 1967. Initially the journal was edited by a Committee constituted by EGGS (Glossop 1992; Williams 2011) although the Editorial Committee became independent in around 1972, and the journal became a product of the nascent Geological Society Publishing House, and it has maintained this independence ever since. At first, the staff editor was based in Burlington House, but for some decades the Geological Society Publishing House has been located in Bath.
The journal was always intended to encompass engineering geology in its broadest sense (http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/qjegh_authorinfo), and thus even in the first volume of the journal, a paper on hydrogeology appeared. Following the formation of the Hydrogeological Group of the Geological Society (HGGS), in 1974 (Mather 2004), the number of such submissions increased. It seemed to be an obvious step to recognize this in the name of the journal and this was discussed in the late 1970s (Glossop 1992). However, although the strapline Encompassing Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology was added from Volume 12 (1979), the name was not amended to Quarterly Journal of Engineering Geology and Hydrogeology until Volume 33 (2000).
A list of Chief Scientific Editors up to the end of 2017 is given in Table 1. This post can be time consuming, and Editors have been supported by their employers in higher education, industry and enterprises such as water authorities; this mix has been seen as contributing to the practical relevance of the QJEGH.
Editors of the QJEGH
Not least amongst the reasons for the founding of EGGS was the then importance of the major road (motorway) construction programme in the UK, which continued for some decades. It rapidly became evident that there was a need for large-scale professional meetings. These occurred in late summer or early autumn each year. Thus in the early years of the journal, papers were sourced not only from unsolicited contributions, but also from the better papers presented at the annual EGGS Regional Meetings, and submitted after the meetings had taken place; the paper content had been exposed to a preliminary peer review and challenge by being presented. Indeed, the 1970 and 1971 Regional Meetings each accounted for two issues of the following years’ volumes (Volumes 4 and 5). These dealt with Engineering Geology: Route Planning, Design and Construction and The Engineering Geology of Slopes. The latter meeting, held in Leeds, and the papers that came from it, reflected the very large amount of work that was being carried out in developing the motorway network in the UK.
Similarly, in 1972, the Regional Meeting held in Bristol generated a large number of papers on slope stability issues, including the outstanding contribution to the science of debris flows from waste tips, encompassing what was learnt from the UK's most disastrous landslide accident, the failure of waste tip No. 7 at the Aberfan colliery in South Wales (Bishop 1973). The number of papers presented required a particularly large double issue of the journal the following year (1973, Volume 6).
Each paper was, of course, considered on its merits and was reviewed in the same way as unsolicited papers. This did lead to some interesting papers disappearing, in some cases to reappear elsewhere (e.g. Chandler 1977). Eventually, the number of offerings threatened to undermine the diversity of papers published, with the journal content in a particular year or years largely reflecting the subject matter of a previous Regional Meeting. The final set of papers from an EGGS Regional Meeting to appear in the journal appeared in 1984 (Volume 17), having been presented at the meeting held in Hull in 1983.
Consequently, the output of the Regional Meetings was subsequently recorded in the Engineering Geology Special Publications (EGSPs) book series. The first EGGS Regional Meeting to be recorded in such a way was the 20th, held in Surrey in 1984, and the papers were published in the second EGSP, on Site Investigation Practice: Assessing BS 5930 (Hawkins 1986).
The EGSP series continues to this day, albeit since the cessation of the EGGS Annual Regional Meetings with a focus more on the provision of high-quality guidance as exemplified by the Hot Deserts: Engineering, Geology and Geomorphology Engineering Group Working Party Report (Walker 2012) and two planned volumes for 2016–17 on Engineering Geology and Geomorphology of Glaciated and Periglaciated Terrains and on Geological Hazards in the UK: their Occurrence, Monitoring and Mitigation. These working party reports themselves date back to the earliest times of the journal, the first to be published being on ‘The logging of rock cores for engineering purposes’ (Knill et al. 1970) with ‘The preparation of maps and plans in terms of engineering geology’ (Anon. 1972) following soon thereafter. These reports are occasionally ‘rediscovered’ online, and there is a flurry of downloads that sometimes elevates them to ‘most downloaded paper’ status, and the longevity of such material makes something of a mockery of an ‘impact factor’ measured on a two year timescale.
Colour images have been a feature almost from the outset of the journal; Issue 2 of Volume 1 contains a coloured sketch of the Kainji Dam in Nigeria, and colour plates appear in the following issue. From the outset, as Glossop (1992) noted, the highest quality of presentation was considered important and the hardcopy journal maintains this philosophy. However, the production of colour in print is an expensive process and this effectively limited the amount of colour illustrations that could be reproduced in the journal.
The electronic edition of the QJEGH was initiated in October 1999 with Volume 32; earlier volumes were made available online shortly thereafter. The electronic version became the definitive one from Volume 41 (2008) onwards. At the same time an entirely online submission process, initially through AllenTrack but now through Editorial Manager (http://www.editorialmanager.com/qjegh/mainpage.html), opened up the options in respect of colour. Authors may now submit in colour and their work will be so reproduced in the definitive online version and in greyscale in the hardcopy version (the same image must be used for both and thus must reproduce clearly in both versions). Colour reproduction in the hardcopy edition remains a matter for the journal's colour budget, although most typically this can be accommodated with a nominal contribution from authors.
The online version of the journal resides in the Society's Lyell Collection, which also houses, in addition to the volumes of the QJEGH, more than 170 volumes of the Journal of the Geological Society (and its predecessors) dating back to 1845, hundreds of Special Publications (Volume 434 was published in 2016), 27 Engineering Geology Special Publications, and the back catalogues of a further eight journals and two other book series published by the Society and its Publishing House.
In addition to papers and photographic features, discussions and technical notes are also published in the QJEGH. Discussion can often spark a lively debate on a subject important to contemporaneous construction activity and a few years ago the subject of peat instability came to the fore in the light of wind-farm development, particularly in the Republic of Ireland (e.g. Boylan et al. 2009; Winter et al. 2009; Long & Boylan 2011).
Cover photographs and photographic features
A cover photograph was introduced for Volume 5 (1972). Commonly, the cover photographs have featured landslides simply because landslides are photogenic, accessible and widespread; the Editorial Board actively seek, but often fail to find, suitable images of other subjects or features. This fact is frequently recognized by members of the Editorial Board, particularly those whose interests lie outside the landslides arena. As the same cover photograph appears on four issues, it only rarely conveys a sense of immediacy, and so an illustration is chosen on the grounds of impact.
As an example of a significant cover picture, one could consider the photograph of the 4 September 2010 Darfield earthquake in New Zealand that graced the cover of the 2011 volume and was supported by a photographic feature on the same subject (Barrell et al. 2011). The 50th anniversary year of the Vaiont landslide disaster was commemorated by a photograph of the notorious landslide. The first article formally recognized as a Photographic Feature complemented the cover photograph of that volume (Anon. 1983) and featured the Victoria Dam, part of the Mahaweli Development Project in Sri Lanka. These features are intended to allow articles that are driven by the illustrations of exceptional events, features or processes, or by the exceptional quality of the illustrations and/or observations made. The balance between illustration and text is flexible, but the text must adequately describe the imagery, set it in context, and draw meaningful observations and conclusions. Photographic features have become a regular and popular part of the journal and in the final part of the 2015 volume three photographic features describe a landslide in the south of England (Maynard & Bromhead 2015), a novel indicator of vibration damage in concrete (Braithwaite & Heath 2015), and the habit and form of gypsum crystals in Irish mudstone (Matheson & Jones 2015).
Glossop Lectures
The company for which Rudolph Glossop worked, John Mowlem, was building the William Girling Reservoir (known at the time simply as the Chingford reservoir) in 1939 when it failed, in consequence of which Glossop met both Skempton and Terzaghi. Mowlem went on to start the UK's first geotechnical company, Soil Mechanics Ltd. Glossop's was therefore an obvious choice of name to be given to a series of prestigious lectures by distinguished invited speakers. Including 2011, the seventeenth of these will be presented in late 2016 (Table 2).
Glossop Lectures, Lecturers and papers
The associated papers are generally published close to the date of the Lecture in the QJEGH, but are subject to review in the ordinary way. Glossop Lectures have included detailed accounts of landsliding, with special emphasis on geomorphology, such as those by Hutchinson (2001) and Brunsden (2002); Fookes's Glossop Lecture (Fookes 1997) was more general, but no less influential, in context. More recently, Culshaw (2005) set the scene for 3D geological mapping, and the work by de Freitas (2009) led to a series of projects that are changing the way in which engineering geologists view the London Basin.
Authors have considerable freedom in respect of the length of their paper and how accurately it reflects the spoken lecture itself. However, overlong papers are discouraged, as these reduce the capacity of the journal to publish other papers.
In the field of hydrogeology the equivalent named lecture is the Ineson Lecture. The Ineson Lecturer is selected by the International Association of Hydrogeologists and there is thus no compunction on the Lecturers to publish their paper in the QJEGH, and it tends to be those with strong links to the UK community who choose to do so. To date four Ineson Lecturers have published the papers from their lectures in the QJEGH (Foster 2000; Skinner 2008; Wang et al. 2009; Younger 2014).
Status
Review process
The refereeing of papers submitted to the QJEGH is undertaken to the highest international standards. Each paper is assigned to one of three Assistant Scientific Editors nominally covering engineering geology, hydrogeology and geomaterials, although there is inevitably a great deal of crossover. The assigned Assistant Scientific Editor then identifies and selects a Board Member to act as Internal Reviewer. Normally the Internal Reviewer will have extensive knowledge of the broad subject area of the paper although not necessarily being an expert. Together the Internal Reviewer and the Assistant Scientific Editor identify, invite and select one, or often more, External Reviewers, who will be recognized as expert in the subject area(s) of the paper.
It is the responsibility of the Internal Reviewer to amalgamate the views of the External Reviewers with their own and to make a recommendation to the Assistant Scientific Editor, who then makes the decision that is sent to the authors, consulting the Chief Scientific Editor as necessary. The Chief Scientific Editor is, in this way, freed from day-to-day involvement in the review process and can thus genuinely act as an independent arbiter when a difference of opinion persists.
The review process is completed entirely within the online submission and review system, thereby leaving an online trail and speeding up the process.
International standing
The papers submitted to the QJEGH are derived from around the world. The geographical location of paper authors is split more or less equally between the UK and the rest of the world, as is the geographical focus of the papers themselves.
The Editorial Board itself is currently divided approximately 60:40 between the UK and the rest of the world; the international representation continuing to rise from a split of 75:25 in 2006. This broadly mirrors the increase in non-UK authors and papers, as in 2006 almost 75% of authors were from the UK and 60% of papers were geographically focused on the UK.
The Impact Factor has risen commensurately and, for a journal that has a very applied readership, it is considered that a notional value of unity, as has been maintained over the last decade, is appropriate.
The same period has seen a significant increase in the number of discussion articles published, a feature that the authors view as a sign of a healthy profession. There has also been an increase in the number of pages published each year since 2006, and 2012 saw a new more efficient layout, which was further revised in 2015. Taken together, these factors correspond to a 62% increase in the number of similarly sized articles published per volume. These changes were necessary, in large part, to accommodate increased international submissions.
As submissions are drawn from all over the world, it can be difficult for non-native English speakers to adequately articulate their arguments. This is a problem commonly experienced for journal editors throughout the English-speaking world. The Editorial Board gladly offers advice to non-native English speakers and is continually reviewing advice to authors in this respect.
Impact
The Impact Factor (IF) can be a contentious issue but is intended to be a measure of the academic impact of a paper and by extrapolation the academic impact of a journal. To achieve this the impact factor of a journal is calculated by dividing the number of current year citations of source items published in the previous two years by the number of source items published in that journal during the previous two years’ (Garfield 1994). In other words, the IF for year x is calculated from the sum of the number of citations for articles published in years (x − 1) and (x − 2), but made in year x, divided by the sum of the number of articles published in years (x − 1) and (x − 2). This if citations are denoted by C and number of articles by N we have
This perhaps works best for fast-moving subject areas, and indeed those subject areas in which the author list tends to be rather extensive. In engineering and geological subject areas the values of IF tend to be rather lower but the QJEGH has made great strides in increasing its IF and for the first time the statistic for 2014, published in 2015, breached the ‘magic’ figure of unity.
Perhaps the real impact of papers published in the QJEGH on both society and the profession is more appropriately represented by slightly less quantitative, more qualitative measures such as the near-habitual use of QJEGH papers over the longer terms in design and other consultancy reports and in university teaching. Inevitably, review papers and papers that provide definitive advice on important subjects, including some of the aforementioned Working Party Reports, make a major contribution in this respect. With the whole inventory of past papers now available online, the older papers are much more accessible to organizations that were not early subscribers to the journal. Some papers now appear in Gold Open Access, where the authors (or more probably the organizations they work for) have met the cost of publishing the paper such that it may be downloaded without charge by anybody, including non-subscribers. The remainder of the papers are published under Green Open Access, where the final published version cannot be independently made available, but where the author can upload their final manuscript on a publicly accessible site. The explosive growth of websites such as ResearchGate and academia.edu is forcing reconsideration of publication rights.
Conclusions
The QJEGH has become more international in character, both as a result of the deliberate actions of the Editorial Board and also as the international community is driven increasingly to publish in English-language journals. The reasons for this latter factor are not entirely clear, but may well reflect some unintentional bias towards the English language in the citation indices.
As the citation index that is most used in the UK, the Impact Factor counts only citations to papers published in the previous two calendar years, ensuring that rapid publication and currency of the material published is critical for all journals. Clearly, those who publish large numbers of papers in multiple volumes have an advantage, as a greater proportion of their papers are exposed to potential citation for a greater proportion of the 2 year window. Relatively small journals such as the QJEGH are at something of a disadvantage in this context. Similarly, the applied nature of the journal means that its audience comprises a high proportion of practitioners who may cite QJEGH papers in unpublished reports more often than in citation-indexed journals. Although this limits the potential Impact Factor of the QJEGH, the Editors celebrate the practical nature of the journal and its papers, and its corresponding value to the broader profession.
The QJEGH saw substantial growth between 2008 and 2012 and since that time the journal has effectively stabilized. This was achieved without detriment to the quality of the published papers, reflecting the growing number of international papers as well as the dedication of the Editorial Board as a whole and the External Reviewers.
One of the invited review papers to be published as part of this series considers the future: for engineering geology and hydrogeology as disciplines; for postgraduate education particularly, but also undergraduate education in those fields; for practical training; and last but by no means least, what changes will have an impact on publication of the science and practice, and thus affect the QJEGH directly.
There is no doubt that the pace of change in publishing has increased. For almost the first 40 volumes, there was little difference in the way in which authors counted the publication date, and obtained a stock of ‘offprints’ to be sent out to friends, colleagues and co-workers; or to provide a reserve to meet the demands of people who requested an offprint copy. Sometimes, the requests came by postcard from some far-flung outpost of the science. Nowadays, the once-ubiquitous offprint has just about disappeared, with ‘Online First’ advancing the publication date, and the paper being readily downloadable to international subscribers to the Lyell Collection or Science Direct. Indeed, the QJEGH leapfrogged the move to full colour publishing by making the online version the definitive one.
Another way that the future has already arrived is in the mechanism for submission. By the time the QJEGH was launched, the manuscript had been replaced by the typescript, but the biggest revolution was the submission of files in electronic word processor format, and, in due course, this became the standard way to submit via an online, Internet-based, submission system. Technical developments in these led to the QJEGH, along with other GSPH journals, moving its online submission system from Allentrack™ to Editorial Manager™. Electronic publishing has been one of the drivers of strong branding on the front page of every paper because nowadays individual papers stand on their own much more than in the past and the electronic version of QJEGH papers has been definitive since 2008. The ease of access and distribution of these electronic files and the rise of portals such as ResearchGate and Academia is changing the ways in which researchers interact and communicate with each other, disseminate their work and interact with the work of their peers; although information overload might be an emerging hazard, such additional communication ought to lead to greater scientific advances and adoption of those advances.
- © 2016 The Author(s)
