Emerging trends about uncertainty in hydrologic modeling and water resources management: A bibliometrics analysis

Water resources management is a challenging task caused by huge uncertainties and complexities in hydrological processes and human activities. Over the last three decades, various scholars have carried out the study on hydrological simulation under complex conditions, and quantitatively characterize the associated uncertainties for water resources systems. To keep abreast of the development of collective knowledge in this field, a scientometric review and metasynthesis of the existing uncertainty analysis research for supporting hydrological modeling and water resources management is conducted. A total of 2,020 publications from 1991 to 2018 were acquired from Web of Science. The scientific structure, cooperation, and frontiers of the related domain were explored by the science mapping software of CiteSpace. Through co-citation, collaboration, and co-occurrence network study, the results present the leading contributors among all countries and hotspots in the research domain. Besides, synthetical uncertainty management for hydrological models and water resource systems under climatic and land use change will continue to be focused on.