Abstract: In order to provide reference for the development of Journal of Yangtze River Scientific Research Institute and water conservancy research, we analyzed all the papers published since it was founded in 1984 in terms of annual growth trend, author, institution and key words. Results showed that: a) the number of funded papers are increasing gradually, accounting for 71.73%, which guaranteed the academic quality of the Journal; b) the number of annual published articles is growing slowly which indicate that the journal is still in development; c) the average number of papers by highly productive core authors reaches 33.44; d) the increment ratio of papers is 0.43, higher than theoretical optimum value 0.26, with plenty of one-time authors, thus the author group needs to be stabilized; e) cooperative research has become a mainstream trend.

Key words: Journal of Yangtze River Scientific Research Institute, scientific papers, external characteristics, bibliometric method, development suggestions