USGS professional paper

Our screening does not flag USGS professional paper. That is not a guarantee of quality — it means the venue is not on Beall's archive (frozen since 2017) and does not match our name-pattern heuristic. It is listed in Scopus, which is a positive signal.

Per our venue index, USGS professional paper appears in: Scopus. Index membership changes over time — confirm on the index's own site before relying on it.

Papers in USGS professional paper are cited about 3.1 times each within two years of publication, and Scimago places it in Q4, with an h-index of 163. Those are the open equivalents: the Clarivate Journal Impact Factor is a proprietary metric we neither compute nor license, so we show the two-year citation rate and Scimago quartile instead — they answer the same question of how heavily the journal is cited. A citation rate is a property of a field as much as of a journal.

In the Scimago Journal Rank 2025 edition, USGS professional paper is Q4 in all 2 of its subject categories. By category: Water Science and Technology: Q4, #238 of 289; Geology: Q4, #279 of 334. Quartiles split the journals in a subject category into four equal groups by SJR, so Q1 is the most-cited quarter and Q4 the least; USGS professional paper is cited about 3.1 times per paper over two years, with an h-index of 163.

The Web of Science quartile comes from Clarivate's Journal Citation Reports (JCR), a proprietary product we neither license nor compute — so we cannot state a JCR quartile for USGS professional paper. The open equivalent is its Scimago quartile, Q4, derived from Scopus citation data. Because JCR ranks against Web of Science and Scimago against Scopus, the two can differ, so check Clarivate's site directly if you need the JCR quartile specifically.

Our index records its access status as "gold". Where this is derived from publisher-level signals rather than works-level data it is a heuristic, so confirm on the journal's own site — particularly if an article processing charge matters to you.