Hydrogeology Journal continues to achieve IAH’s goals of serving the professional, practical and scientific communities in groundwater hydrology. The journal celebrated its 30th anniversary by maintaining its impressive scientific Impact Factor (IF), the latest available (2021) being 3.151. This is a measure of the number of times that people who publish articles in scientific journals have cited articles in HJ – so the IF indicates the scientific usefulness and value of HJ content.

HJ also has a very high Usage Factor of 428,752 downloads (2021, increased from 364,777 in 2020). This is a measure of how many times readers download HJ articles. This means that people read and use HJ content, perhaps for professional and for practical water-resources management purposes, even though many of these users do not ever reference these HJ articles in journal publications that are included in IF counts.

AS part of IAH’s ‘year for groundwater’ and contributing to the UN World Water Day campaign, to ‘make the invisible visible’, a “Topical Collection” of essays by our commissions and networks, has been brought together. This offers a comprehensive update on topics, including: global challenges, emerging threats and novel approaches on groundwater quality; a risk‑based regulatory approach for managed aquifer recharge; threats and opportunities about groundwater and climate change; global perspective on assessing groundwater quality; transboundary aquifers and how to solve their issues; terminology-related challenges on regional groundwater flow; management of seawater intrusion and freshwater supply in coastal aquifers.

During the year Springer, our publisher, took the decision to introduce a new content management system, following the takeover of the company providing the previous system by a competitor. This will provide challenges for our editorial staff, particularly since the previous system had only recently been established, and which had required considerable efforts by the IAH team.