The impact of regional water resources capacity building: Citations of the published proceedings of the annual WaterNet/WARFSA/GWP-SA symposia in Southern Africa, 2001–2005

This paper measures the scientific impact of two regional water resources capacity building programmes in Southern Africa: WaterNet and WARFSA. The articles emanating from the annual symposia organised jointly by both programmes during the period 2001–2005 and published in special issues of Physics and Chemistry of the Earth were analysed in terms of numbers and citations. The paper concludes that these articles represent a significant portion of all published articles covering similar topics. Moreover, these articles were also frequently cited, on average, approximately 0.8 times during the two year period after their publication. This is positive evidence of the scientific impact that the capacity building programmes are having. The data presented in this paper provide a useful baseline for measuring success in the coming years.