About HydroResearch

HydroResearch

HydroResearch is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal published by KeAi Communications in Beijing, China, with publishing services provided by Elsevier and hosting on ScienceDirect. Its online ISSN is 2589-7578, and its articles carry digital object identifiers in the 10.1016/j.hydres series. The journal features original research papers, short communications, review articles and book reviews across the broader field of hydrology and its neighbouring disciplines: ecohydrology, hydrobiology, hydrogeochemistry, hydrometeorology, water resources and the water environment, including water management and policy issues. Unlike the newest titles in the KeAi programme, HydroResearch has an active multi-volume archive on ScienceDirect and an established record of published research, special issues and calls for papers.

Copyright in the journal is held by KeAi Communications Co. Ltd., with publishing services by Elsevier B.V. The journal is also represented in KeAi's partnership with SSRN's First Look programme, under which authors may share a preprint version of a manuscript for community feedback while it undergoes peer review; the journal's First Look page has listed dozens of papers under review or in preprint. Indexing summaries record the journal in the Directory of Open Access Journals. ScienceDirect's journal metrics have reported a submission-to-decision-after-review time of 139 days, giving prospective authors a concrete indication of the journal's review pace.

Aims and scope

The journal's aims and scope define hydrology broadly and deliberately. HydroResearch welcomes manuscripts offering new insights into all subfields of hydrological science at local, regional and global scales, the development of new methods and models, and instrumentation and field-based research. It encourages the application of statistical, modelling and remote sensing methods to hydrological sciences, and multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary research on hydrological problems that integrates hydrology with ecological, environmental, geological and meteorological sciences, as well as the social and economic sciences.

That breadth is structural, not rhetorical. Water problems rarely sit inside one discipline: a flood study may need meteorology, geomorphology, statistics and land-use policy at once, and a groundwater study may need geochemistry, biology and resource economics. By scoping the journal across the hydro- disciplines and explicitly inviting integration with social and economic sciences, HydroResearch positions itself as a general journal for the water sciences rather than a narrow technical title — a venue where a methods paper, a field study and a management analysis can appear side by side and be read by the same audience.

Hydrological processes and extremes

The first topic group in the journal's scope covers hydrological processes themselves: the physical, chemical and biological interactions within the water cycle, and the inter-relationships between groundwater, surface water, snow and ice. Research here addresses how water moves, is stored and changes state and composition across catchments, aquifers and cryospheric stores — the process understanding on which all applied hydrology depends. Field-based research and new instrumentation are expressly within scope, reflecting the discipline's dependence on observation.

A second named topic is hydrological extremes and their ecological impacts. Floods and droughts are the extremes with the most direct consequences for people and ecosystems, and the journal's framing links the events themselves to their ecological effects — how high and low flows reshape habitats, water quality and biological communities. A further topic covers the impacts of climate change and land-use change on hydrological cycles, sediment connectivity and soil erosion, connecting the journal to one of the central applied questions in contemporary hydrology: how a changing climate and changing landscapes are altering the quantity, timing and quality of water, and the movement of sediment through river systems.

Hydrogeochemistry, ecohydrology and the water environment

Hydrogeochemical behaviour — its controlling processes and its modelling — is a named topic, covering the chemistry of natural waters: how solutes originate, move and transform in groundwater and surface water, and how those processes can be characterised and simulated. This strand connects the journal to water quality science, contaminant transport and the geochemical management of water resources.

The journal's title disciplines of ecohydrology and hydrobiology run through the scope as well. Ecohydrology examines the interactions between water and ecosystems — how hydrological regimes sustain ecological function and how ecosystems, in turn, regulate hydrological processes — while hydrobiology addresses aquatic life in relation to its water environment. The journal's special-issue activity shows this strand in practice: a special issue on aquatic ecological processes and management, guest-edited by Yan Xu of China University of Geosciences and Hongwei Yu of the Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, focuses on the interactions between hydrological dynamics, water quality and aquatic ecological processes across freshwater, estuarine and coastal ecosystems, including how flow regimes, nutrient transport, sediment dynamics and pollutant inputs influence biogeochemical cycling, food web structure, biodiversity patterns and ecosystem functioning.

Water resources, management and policy

Water resources, water culture, water management and policy issues form an explicit topic in the scope — a commitment that distinguishes HydroResearch from purely physical hydrology journals. Research in this strand addresses how water is allocated, governed and valued: management systems, policy instruments, and the cultural dimensions of water use. Its presence follows from the journal's stated openness to integration with social and economic sciences, and it gives practitioners and policy researchers a place in the same journal as process scientists, so that findings about how water systems behave can be read alongside analysis of how they should be managed.

Urban hydrology, mountain hydrology and flooding modelling complete the named topic list. Urban hydrology addresses the water cycle as transformed by cities — impervious surfaces, drainage networks, stormwater and urban flood risk — while mountain hydrology addresses the headwater regions where snow, ice, steep terrain and intense precipitation govern downstream water supply. Flooding modelling, which serves both, is the computational practice of predicting flood extent, depth and timing for planning, warning and design. The journal's calls for papers reflect the same priorities: a special issue on urban stormwater management and flood mitigation strategies has been announced with a submission deadline of 31 December 2026.

Methods: statistics, modelling and remote sensing

Methodologically, the journal encourages three families of approach across all of its topics. Statistical methods underpin the analysis of hydrological records, extremes and uncertainty. Modelling — of processes, geochemistry, floods and water resources — is the discipline's principal tool for prediction and scenario analysis, and the development of new methods and models is expressly welcomed. Remote sensing brings satellite and aerial observation to bear on precipitation, soil moisture, snow and ice, surface water and catchment change, extending hydrological observation beyond gauge networks. A systematic review of remote sensing applications in the Upper Blue Nile Basin, published in the journal in 2024, illustrates the kind of methods synthesis the journal carries.

A current special issue on intelligent sensing and collaborative governance of water systems, with a submission deadline of 31 December 2026, shows where the journal sees methods heading: it captures the frontier at which advanced sensing technologies — spanning satellite, aerial, in-situ and Internet of Things platforms — converge with data-driven governance. The pairing is characteristic of the journal's scope design: sensing and governance, the technical and the institutional, treated in a single call, just as the topic list pairs hydrological processes with water policy.

Article types and publication practice

The journal publishes four article forms: original research papers, short communications, reviews and book reviews. Short communications allow significant results and methods to be reported quickly in compact form; reviews synthesise subfields for the journal's broad readership; book reviews keep the community informed of the monograph literature in the water sciences. All content is open access, so articles are free to read and download on ScienceDirect immediately on publication, and the journal's archive is openly browsable by volume and issue.

Through the KeAi–SSRN First Look arrangement, authors submitting to the journal may opt to post a preprint of their manuscript on the journal's SSRN page once editors have invited expert reviewers, receiving community feedback during peer review. First Look postings are explicitly preliminary and not peer-reviewed, and the journal presents them as such. This optional early-sharing route, combined with conventional peer review and open-access final publication, gives authors both speed of dissemination and the assurance of a reviewed version of record.

Publisher and place in the water literature

HydroResearch is published within KeAi Communications, the Beijing-based open-access venture co-founded by China Science Publishing & Media and Elsevier. KeAi — whose name is explained in its SSRN journal pages as Chinese for “love for science” — was repurposed as an open-access journal publishing service provider in 2013 and has developed a portfolio of more than 280 scholarly journals. It unfolds research globally using Elsevier's platforms, including ScienceDirect hosting and Editorial Manager submission handling. For a water-sciences journal, that infrastructure places a China-based title in front of the world's largest science readership platform while retaining an editorial identity rooted in the Chinese hydrological research community, whose institutions are visible among the journal's guest editors and authors.

Within the water literature, the journal competes and coexists with society hydrology journals and commercial water-resources titles by offering a broad-scope, fully open-access alternative with an explicitly interdisciplinary charter. Its coverage — from groundwater–surface water interactions and hydrogeochemistry to ecohydrology, flood modelling, remote sensing and water policy — mirrors the way water research is actually organised in large national programmes, particularly in China, where basin-scale water security, flood control, ecological restoration and water quality are managed as connected problems. Researchers who need a single venue read by process scientists, ecologists, geochemists, modellers and water managers alike will find that breadth to be the journal's defining feature.

Access and identification

Readers can access the journal through its ScienceDirect journal homepage, which carries its aims and scope, editorial board, current articles, calls for papers and archive, and through its KeAi Publishing presence. The journal is identified by online ISSN 2589-7578, and its DOIs take the form 10.1016/j.hydres followed by the article's year and number — for example, the 2024 remote-sensing review cited above is 10.1016/j.hydres.2024.09.002. The journal's official website, as recorded for this directory, is its ScienceDirect journal page. All published content is open access and free to read.