Regional flood frequency analysis : a bibliometric overview

In water resources management, environmental and ecological studies, estimation of design streamflow is often needed. For gauged catchments, at-site flood frequency analysis is used for this purpose; however, for ungauged catchments, regional flood frequency analysis (RFFA) is the preferred method. RFFA attempts to transfer flood characteristics from gauged to ungauged catchments based on the assumption of regional homogeneity. A bibliometric analysis on RFFA is presented here using Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases. A total of 626 articles were selected from these databases. From the bibliometric analysis, it has been found that Journal of Hydrology and Water Resources Research are the two leading journals reporting RFFA research. In RFFA research, leading countries include Canada, USA, UK, Italy and Australia. In terms of citations, the top performing researchers are Ouarda T, Burn D, Rahman A, Haddad K and Chebana F. Future research should be directed towards the identification of homogeneous regions, application of efficient artificial intelligence (AI)-based RFFA models, incorporation of climate change impacts and uncertainty analysis.