The ICL Journal Landslides—16 Years of Capacity Development for Landslide Risk Reduction

Capacity building and capacity development for landslide risk reduction is an important pillar of the International Consortium on Landslides, Kyoto, Japan. This non-governmental organization with close to 100 full members, associates and supporters was established in 2001, and among many activities in this first two decades we may raise the latest overreaching one, namely the Sendai Partnerships 2015–2025 as the free commitment to Sendai Framework on Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030. The Kyoto Commitment 2020 to be discussed and accepted at 5th World Landslide Forum in Kyoto in November 2020, again stresses the importance for the ICL to raise awareness and enhance preparedness for landslide disasters as the ICL efforts for capacity building and capacity development in this field. The ICL stimulates landslide research that has to support capacity building for landslide risk reduction. Springer Nature publishes the journal Landslides: Journal of the International Consortium on Landslides since 2004. Being examined in the past by different authors from bibliometric and editorial point of view, this review paper focuses on the journal’s 16 years of achievements (2004–2019). In these 16 years, 1313 papers were published on 16,286 pages, written by 5534 authors and with more than 1.1 million downloads and nearly 25,000 citations as in early 2020. The bibliometric analysis of Landslides and its comparison with a few selected similar journals of high reputation, among them Engineering Geology and Bulletin of Engineering Geology and the Environment, confirmed high rankings of Landslides in the research categories of geological & geotechnical engineering and engineering geology. Strong and weak points are discussed from the bibliometric point of view, stressing the need for higher internationality of co-authorship of published articles in order to be true international journal. Continuous publishing and the move to a monthly journal in 2018 has further increase journal's h-index and cited half-life of citations, but further editorial efforts should be directed to attract excellent review papers and focused technical notes to increase cites per paper and the number of Highly Cited papers. Until 2020, Landslides is the foremost journal in the field of landslide disaster risk reduction, and the top young international journal in the fields of geotechnical engineering and engineering geology.