16: Geomorphology
Interview with Dr. R.A. Marston, Kansas State University, October 2007
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The subject of this installment of Periodical Radio is the scholarly journal Geomorphology. It is published by Elsevier in 10 volumes per year, with 4 issues per volume. Geomorphology began publication in 1987. The scope includes a broad range of geomorphic themes, including tectonics, glacial processes, volcanics, erosion and weathering, dunes and deserts, remote sensing methods, and hazards. Geomorphology is a journal included in Elsevier's Science Direct package of online scientific journals.
To learn more about Geomorphology and the experience of editing a scientific journal published by Elsevier and included in Science Direct, I've invited its editor, Dr. Richard A. Marston, University Distinguished Professor at Kansas State University, to be my guest.
Steve: Dr. Marston, welcome to Periodical Radio.
Dr. Marston: Thank you.
Steve: Geomorphology covers a broad range of topics. Could you summarize for our listeners the topic areas included in the journal?
Dr. Marston: Geomorphology is the study of landforms and the processes that create them, including the effects of humans on erosion rates and so on. So we welcome manuscripts that look at the full range of topics related to the study of landforms, including papers on theory as well as site-specific studies. These topics might cover things as wide-ranging as glacial landforms, landforms created by rivers, landslides, the weathering of rocks and soils, karst landscapes--sinkholes and that sort of thing, aeolian processes and landforms, coastal dunes, lakes, quantitative geomorphology, and now even more and more landforms on other planets. So it’s pretty wide ranging, and we are more and more accepting a greater variety of articles, not just the traditional research articles, but also articles related to, let’s say, review articles that review the literature on a given topic. We have a faster review process for articles that are more fast-breaking news. For instance, finding something on Mars, we can get that into our journal much more quickly.
Steve: One of the items in the scope of the journal when I was reading about it was “hazards”. Could you explain what that would encompass in terms of geomorphology?
Dr. Marston: Yes, it’s often said that if some catastrophic event like a landslide occurs, but no one sees it, is it a hazard? Well, when people get involved, either triggering catastrophic events or hazardous events, or they are affected by it, that falls within the range of geomorphology. That is to say, hazards that are related to earth surface processes. So we might talk about shifting river channels, or extremely high erosion rates, maybe sometimes deposition of sediment in stream channels and how that increases flooding, the kind of problems we’ve seen down in New Orleans. And the loss of wetlands and how that can affect erosion by hurricanes along the coasts. Volcanoes, we’ve published articles on volcanic hazards, and dust storms, in terms of a hazard created by wind. So a lot of the processes that geomorphology looks at also become hazards whenever humans are in the vicinity. We just in fact last year published a special issue of the journal called “The Human Role in Changing Fluvial Systems.” I was just checking today, and some of those articles rank in our top 25 most downloaded articles, which the publisher keeps track of.
Steve: Right. Well a fluvial process would be one. Can you explain other ways that humans affect geomorphology?
Dr. Marston: Oh, in so many different ways. Let’s just talk about hill slope failures—landslides, mud flows, other types of failures. For instance, by removing the forest cover on a hill slope, some period of time later the roots, the tree roots will decay, and then you’ve lost the soil binding effect of the roots, and if a major earthquake or a huge rainstorm comes along, nothing is left to hold the soil in place, and you might have a mass movement, a large-scale slope failure. So that’s one that is frequently comes up. But we also look at things like more slowly producing human effects, for instance through climate change on glacial processes. As glaciers retreat in mountain areas, they often create a lake in front of the glacier between the ice and the moraine that the glacier had created. As the glacier continues to retreat, these lakes can enlarge and sometimes break through the moraine, causing a catastrophic outburst flood downstream. As we see glaciers retreating in mountain areas around the world, this is becoming a bigger and bigger concern.
Steve: Global warming gets a lot of press nowadays. What else is happening with our planet that gets little or no press, but that deserves our attention? You mentioned the deforestation.
Dr. Marston: Yes.
Steve: Anything else?
Dr. Marston: Well, I would say just the overall rate that we’re losing the soil, especially from agricultural activities. One of the members of our editorial board, David Montgomery, at the University of Washington, just wrote a book about this called Dirt. In it he documents very carefully the higher rate of soil loss from agricultural land compared to what would have occurred without agriculture in similar landscapes. The rate of erosion from agricultural land is many orders of magnitude higher worldwide when you compare it with uncultivated land. Of course we all need the products from agricultural land, so you don’t see an awful lot of attention given to this, even though the rates of soil loss from agricultural land are starting to move to very alarming rates, much faster than we can replenish the soil, either waiting for natural geologic processes to do it, or through fertilization and other subsidies. I would say that’s another issue that deserves a lot of attention.
Steve: Globally, or just in the United States? Are there areas where that’s a particularly critical problem?
Dr. Marston: You know, it’s everywhere. I think that you can look at some of the areas in China and in Europe as having accelerated rates of erosion, especially China, I would say. But many of the marginal lands around the world are being farmed as there is increasing pressure for supplying food from local sources. Then this marginal land during a period extreme weather, either drought or a heavy rainfall, can be lost as agricultural land. Then the land is no longer able to produce crops at the same rate, and you’ve taken it out of the long term sustainability options. Also in mountain areas, as the population pressures increase in mountain areas you see terracing, which is generally a very good thing, actually increasing the stability of many hill slope areas. But if the population pressures become too great, the terracing might encroach on slopes that are just too steep, and subject to events like earthquakes or streams undercutting the toe of the slope, or very heavy rainfall, perhaps during a monsoon, and again the hill slopes can fail. So I don’t think we can just point the finger in one place, but in a general sense it’s the marginal places for producing agriculture where some of the human impacts are being strongly felt.
Steve: Has understanding of these human affects increased significantly since you first began researching geomorphology?
Dr. Marston: Yes, I’d say they have. Over the last 30 years, the number of scientific publications first of all has greatly exploded, and we have journals in several different countries that are international journals publishing articles related to landforms and geomorphology. You know, it’s hard to really come up with an exact number of geomorphologists around the world, but it’s many thousands, maybe not over ten thousand. But just the amount of information that’s available through the scientific journals, certainly, but in other ways as well, is indicative of the growth of knowledge in this area. Translating knowledge into better policies for controlling soil erosion, that’s where the greater challenge is right now.
Steve: That leads me to a question I that had about who reads the journal. Obviously, professional researchers at research universities are a primary audience. Who else reads and benefits from the journal Geomorphology?
Dr. Marston: This is a good question, because the answer is quite different now than what I would have said even 5 years ago. Five years ago the journal only came out in printed form, and you had perhaps several hundred subscribers worldwide in terms of individuals and maybe a few thousand libraries. But now the journal is available electronically, and we’re keeping statistics about this. The number of articles from our journal that are downloaded worldwide has increased from zero five years ago to 300,000 this last year. These come from all over the world, so the information is becoming more readily available, not just in the developed world, but in the lesser developed countries, where they may not be able to afford printed subscriptions, even in university libraries, but the publisher negotiates with each country what the rate of subscribing to their electronic delivery service will be.
Steve: That was one of my later questions, which I’ll go ahead and address now. This online package is Elsevier’s Science Direct package. My question was going be, are you pleased with how the journal is presented and accessed in Science Direct? But I think you answered that question, if you went from zero in the print area, and maybe less than a thousand print subscriptions, was it?
Dr. Marston: Well, probably less than a thousand individual, personal subscriptions. The number of library subscriptions, I’m actually not sure, I’m guessing several thousand, something like that worldwide.
Steve: But Science Direct gives the journal much broader exposure.
Dr. Marston: That’s right. You can have access to Science Direct without having a full subscription. It’s controversial, I mean, the whole electronic delivery business is changing very quickly. It would be nice if it didn’t cost anything, but publishers need to recover the costs somehow, so these rates are negotiated with probably each library. The net effect, though, has been an enormous increase in the ability of individuals and universities and other institutions to access the literature, which is ultimately what you want. What kind of an environment we’ll be talking about five years from now, in terms of how articles will be delivered is hard to predict.
Steve: So you don’t have a prediction of whether a print issue will still be produced in 5 years?
Dr. Marston: Well, I hope so. I’m old fashioned enough, I still like to have access the journals on my shelf, and pull them off and read them at leisure. I still have a hard time reading things online. But I have to admit that the younger scholars coming up, they’re accustomed to doing that, and they don’t look to purchase the print subscription as much as my generation does. I can’t really predict what’s going to happen there, but it sure seems to be going more to the electronic delivery.
Steve: What’s your perspective, working as an editor, publishing through Elsevier. What services do they provide that support your job as an editor, and are you satisfied with those services?
Dr. Marston: Elsevier has been phasing in over the last five years their editorial system, and about three 3 years ago our journal quit using the traditional delivery of paper manuscripts and sending them out through the mail to reviewers. We do it all now electronically. I don’t think I’d still be doing the job if it weren’t for that. It’s made it much more easy for the editor, and for the authors. Now a first time author has to muddle through the system no matter what publisher they’re working with. In terms of getting the manuscript reviewers right away and being able to communicate with them in terms of returning the reviews to the authors, and in terms of me as an editor reviewing the articles, it all happens much more efficiently, quicker, and I think the end result has been much better. It also allows the author to keep track of where their manuscript is in the overall process. So I think more information is better, and the flow of manuscripts works much better with this electronic system that Elsevier uses.
Steve: Dr. Marston, I'd like to ask a few questions about how science works, and how the work of scientists is reflected in journals. Some observers of science criticize the editing and peer review process as being too insular, too resistant to fresh ideas. They might argue that an innovative idea ahead of its time, perhaps as an example Wegener's theory of plate tectonics back in 1915, could never be published in a journal with the prestige of Geomorphology today. Does that critique have any validity?
Dr. Marston: I think it’s something that is always on an editor’s mind. I think I hope for the arrival of a manuscript that has some breakthrough ideas, and not just another piece of work that could be described as normal science repeating the same test of ideas, but maybe just in a different setting. We’re looking also for these big breakthrough articles, and I think there is a potential if you have negative reviews for something that is really a new and offbeat article, then a good idea might be brushed over. But, I would say that one way we’ve tried to address that problem is by having not only regular issues of the journal that my co-editors and I edit, but we have a number of special issues every year where guest editors are invited to organize a group of authors, usually it’s in connection with a meeting. As I look at the titles from the special issues, many of them are broad topics looking at a theory or a new of way of looking at how landforms develop over time. One of these, though, just to give you an example, has been authored by Jonathan Phillips called “The Perfect Landscape”. Professor Phillips is the professor of geography at the University of Kentucky, and he’s using the movie The Perfect Storm as a metaphor here in describing a perfect landscape. We really have been lacking new theory over time, and he has kind of a new way of viewing how landforms, landscapes change over time. He says that “whereas the laws of physics and chemistry apply everywhere, each particular landscape has an inherited history of environmental change, and a particular combination of geology, vegetation, erosional processes, weathering processes, so that the combination makes it very difficult to predict how landforms will develop over time.” This remains a major challenge when we look at long periods of time. Professor Phillips calls this the “perfect landscape,” and it explains a lot of the difficulties we’ve had as geomorphologists in predicting how these landscapes will change in shape, dimensions, and erodability into the future. That’s been a highly cited and highly regarded manuscript.
Steve: Do you ever receive submissions from independent scholars, from a writer who’s not affiliated with a research institution?
Dr. Marston: Yes, but pretty rarely. I mean, sometimes it’s a scholar who’s retired. That’s maybe not what you’re asking, but I would say, gee, out of the 300 or so manuscripts we receive every year, probably less than five come from an independent scholar. I’m not sure why that is, just there are very few out there who aren’t affiliated with government, or a consulting firm, or a university of some sort.
Steve: But they’re given the benefit of the same process as anyone else?
Dr. Marston: Yes, they are, and I once did some statistics on this just to make sure that we weren’t biased against any of the groups. The acceptance for manuscripts from university professors was slightly higher, but I felt comfortable in saying that there was no bias against accepting manuscripts from authors with either government, consulting firms, or the rare independent scholar.
Steve: Much has been written about the so-called citation impact factor, a measure of how often papers are cited in other papers. Some critics claim that that impact factor skews science in unhealthy ways, giving too much attention and money to some researchers while neglecting other areas. What’s your take on the value of the citation impact factor, and whether it's misused?
Dr. Marston: There’s a lot of interest in the Science Citation impact factor. We track it every year; we compare it with our competing journals. But I know there are a lot of problems in it. For instance, I once heard about an article that was cited 80 times in a year, and then when, this wasn’t in our journal, but when it was investigated why this article was so frequently cited, it was because the author had done something wrong. There was a big error in the methods, so subsequent researchers were citing this article as the way not to investigate this particular geomorphic topic. So things like that can come into play, and I would say that as editors we hope the Science Citation number goes up, but I can’t say I’ve ever made a decision about accepting or not accepting a manuscript wondering, thinking that this would either increase or decrease our science citation factor. Because as I look at these articles that are most often citied, they are not the ones I probably would have predicted. So I’ve learned over time not to worry too much about that factor, but I know the publishers are interested in it, although we’ve never received any instruction as editors to do something different to increase our impact factor.
Steve: Well that’s good to hear. I’d like to backtrack a little bit back to the peer review process. How do you select reviewers? Can you explain for our listeners how that process works? How do you know who would be a good reviewer for a particular topic?
Dr. Marston: Yeah, that’s of course a very key part of what any editor does. The way I do it, when I first receive a manuscript, I read it very quickly and look at the people that have been cited by the author. I look for names that occur repeatedly in the reference list. Then I also, from my own experience, think of people I know who are working in that same area, and make notes on that. Then in our Elsevier editorial system we have a reviewer database, so we can search through that. There are probably four or five thousand names in there. We can search by topic and location and get a list of names. I scroll through those and the history of what that person has done in the past in terms of whether they reviewed for the journal before, have they turned down requests every time, or how long do they take to review. I look at all of those factors and maybe pick from that list. Also, the authors are invited to suggest reviewers. Not all authors do that, but if they do I usually try to get at least one reviewer from their list. What we do in Geomorphology is we like to have one reviewer from our editorial board, and one outside reviewer, at least. Many times I get more than two, but usually ask for maybe five or six. Then, based on who returns the reviews, if there’s some agreement, I might terminate the late reviews and go ahead and make a decision if I have two or three that are really solid.
Steve: What time line do you generally try to stick to for the peer review process, how many weeks?
Dr. Marston: Well, I looked up some statistics on this. The average number of days between when the first reviewer agreed to do the review and the date that the review was completed turns out to be over the last year, 36 days. The average number of days between the date the manuscript was first received and the decision on it is 72 days. Then I wanted to see how long it took authors to revise and resubmit their manuscripts. That turned out to be an average of 85 days, so even longer than the review time. Once an article is accepted, it will appear pretty quickly on Science Direct. But there’s a backlog that’s developed between the time the article is accepted and when it finally appears in print that’s about 200 days.
Steve: Is that acceptable in your mind?
Dr. Marston: No, it’s too long. You know, it’s not as bad as some of the journals, but that’s little solace. I think it should be quite a bit less. To Elsevier’s credit, what they’ve done to respond to this is they’ve given the journal more pages every year to try to reduce the backlog. See, the trouble is that in the last three years the number of manuscripts submitted has doubled, in large part probably because the electronic system makes it so much easier for people anywhere in the world to submit an article. Our acceptance rate hasn’t changed, so that means with so many more manuscripts being accepted, the backlog has developed. We’re probably going to have to start increasing our rejection rate a little bit, so that the backlog doesn’t become a problem. But at least the articles are available as PDFs in a very short period of time, I think a very acceptable period of time, and available through Science Direct. That’s the way most people get their articles, anyway, so that seems to be working out okay.
Steve: Dr. Marston, what do you find to be the personally most rewarding aspect of editing the journal?
Dr. Marston: I still get a nice adrenaline rush whenever I see the actual printed copy come in the mail, my own copy. I still like to look through the articles and find the ones that I edited. It makes me feel good to know that I helped those authors. Every once in a while, I can’t say this happens a lot, but some authors will send an e-mail just expressing their appreciation. Sometimes the article was critical for somebody getting a raise or a promotion or tenure. Those are really nice to get. But I think it’s when I go to professional meetings and people come up more informally and just introduce themselves, and say “You remember editing my article? I appreciated that, it came out nice in the journal.” Just small things like that. You don’t really expect it, it’s just nice when it happens.
Steve: Dr. Marston, this has been a very nice interview. Believe it or not, our time is up.
Dr. Marston: Okay, Steve, it’s been nice talking with you. I think, you know, the whole discipline of geomorphology is growing so fast, I see nothing but good things for not only our journal, but the other ones that deal with geomorphology, so if any of your listeners have any questions they’re more than welcome to contact me.
Steve: Excellent. Thank you again.
Dr. Marston: Nice talking with you.