Topically Diverse Hydrology Research Leads to More Academic Citations

Stakeholders make decisions about water resources based on the state of the knowledge of hydrologic science, depending on data, tools and predictions provided by scientists and practitioners in this field. Funding agencies, scientific unions, and program managers are vested with the responsibility of awarding grants oftentimes keep directing financial resources unaware of the broader effect of their decisions within the community. Using Natural Language Processing, we found that hydrology research articles are becoming more topically diverse, i.e. individual researchers appear to be broadening their scope across different subtopics in the discipline, and while individual topics are changing in popularity over time, the water science and hydrology corpus as a whole is not increasing, nor decreasing, in diversity. To assess the connection between topic diversity and academic impact, we explored the effect of funding topically diverse research topics on academic impact. Specifically, we looked at the relationship between topic diversity and the mean scholarly citation per paper resulting from the projects funded by major U.S., Canadian, European, and Australian agencies. We observed that more topically diverse (interdisciplinary) research led to higher average scholarly citations per article. We also observe that certain topics in hydrology have evolved less than the others in the past ~30 years, offering potential venues of focus within our community.