Trends and gaps in biodiversity and ecosystem services research: A text mining approach (original) (raw)
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Bibliometric analysis of highly cited articles on ecosystem services
PLOS ONE, 2019
This paper presents global research trends involving highly cited articles on ecosystem services from 1981 to 2017 based on a bibliometric analysis of such articles from the SCI-E and SSCI databases of the Web of Science. The analysis revealed that there were 132 highly cited articles, most of which were published between 2005 and 2014. Based on author keywords, the term ecosystem services was strongly linked to biodiversity. The top three journals in terms of total number of highly cited articles published were Ecological Economics, PNAS, and Ecological Indicators. Despite ranking sixth overall, Science ranked first in both impact factor and total citations per article. The US, UK, Netherlands, Spain, and Sweden were the top five most productive and cooperative countries in the world based on total number of highly cited articles and co-authorship network, respectively. The US was highly connected to Canada, the Netherlands, China and the UK. Stockholm University and Stanford University were the most productive institutions in Europe and North America, respectively. Stanford University is associated with many scholars in the field of ecosystem services research because of the InVEST model. Robert Costanza was the most prolific and highly cited author, the latter being largely due to the first valuation of the world's ecosystem services and natural capital, he and his co-authors published in 1997 in Nature. Terrestrial, urban, and forest ecosystems were the top types of ecosystems assessed. Regulating and provisioning services were the major ecosystem services studied. Quantitative and qualitative assessments were the main research focus. Most of these highly cited studies on ecosystem services are done on areas geographically located in North America and Europe.
Analysis of publication trends in ecosystem services research
Ecosystem Services, 2017
Scholarly journal publications on the topic of ecosystem services have substantially grown throughout the past decade, which is evidenced by an expanding worldwide research base. However, several challenges in the field of ecosystem services still remain, including conflicting approaches to ecosystem services terminology, classification schemes, research methods, and reporting requirements. We assess the development and disciplinary focus of ecosystem service research over the last decade using a metaanalysis of peer-reviewed journal publications. The journals of Shengtai Xuebao Acta Ecologica Sinica, Ecosystem Services, PLoS One, and Ecological Economics lead scholarly journals publishing ecosystem services-focused articles. The European Union leads ecosystem services publications (42%), while the United States is responsible for 30% of ecosystem services publications. This analysis is supplemented by a discussion on ecosystem services-focused research and policy to identify trends that encourage future study to resolve some of the current issues faced by the research community.
A Text-Mining Approach to Compare Impacts and Benefits of Nature-Based Solutions in Europe
Sustainability
Worldwide, a large set of initiatives have been carried out aiming to understand the benefits offered by Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) in urban areas. The European Commission (EC) has founded different projects that have performed scientific literature reviews regarding this topic. To objectively compare their results and consolidate the consensus about the impacts and benefits of NBS, we performed a text mining analysis. This methodology coupled with a visual representation of the data allowed to convert the EC funding projects reports (corpus) into a meaningful structured analysis. This method demonstrated that despite the different literature review methodologies of each report, there are common trends exhibited by the results, e.g., the NBS installation as a strategy of urban resilience, the recognition of ecosystem services (ESS) delivered by nature in urban spaces, or the importance of the EC’s supporting role in the promotion of NBS. In addition, some network specific trends h...
Protected Area Effectiveness in the Scientific Literature: A Decade-Long Bibliometric Analysis
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Protected areas (PAs) aim to safeguard biodiversity and ecosystem services in the long term. Despite remarkable growth in the area covered by PAs in recent years, biodiversity trends still show worrisome outcomes. Here, we conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) of scientific articles focusing on the ecological effectiveness of PAs that were published in the 2010–2019 decade using Scopus in order to show the latest publication trends in that research field. After three consecutive screenings, we analyzed a final census sample of 76 articles that used semiexperimental research designs. We assessed 3 thematic variables (i.e., related to ecological effectiveness) and 13 bibliometric variables through descriptive statistics, Spearman correlation tests, and Kruskal–Wallis difference tests. Our results demonstrate the growing size of research teams working on this topic, broader international collaboration, and greater length of the articles published on this subject. During that d...
This study aims to observe the researchers' behavior in Iranian scientific databases to determine the research gaps and priorities in their field of research. Text mining and natural language processing techniques were used to identify what researchers are looking for and to analyze existing research works. In this paper, the information about the behavior of researchers who work in the field of environmental science and existing research works in the Iranian scientific database are processed. The search trends in all areas are evaluated by analyzing the users' search data. The trend analysis indicates that in the period of February 2013 to July 2015, the growth of the researchers' requests in some domains of the environment such as Industry, Training, Assessment, Material, Water and Pollution was 1.5 up to 2 times more than the overall requests. A Combination of the trend analysis and clustering of queries led to shaping four priority zones. Then, the research priorities for each environmental research area were determined. The results show that Training, Pollution, Rangeland, Management and Law are those domains in the environmental research which have the most research gaps in Iran, but there are enough research in Forest, Soil and Industry domains. At the end, we describe the steps for the implementation of a decision support system in environmental research management. Researchers, managers and policy makers can use this proposed ''research demand and supply monitoring'' system or RDSM to make appropriate decisions and allocate their resources more efficiently.
A roadmap for exploring the thematic content of ecology journals
Ecosphere, 2019
Ecologists-especially those new to the field-are tasked with finding relevant literature matching their research interests and deciding upon a suitable venue for the publication of their work. To provide a roadmap for early career researchers to identify journals aligned with their interests, we analyzed major research themes found across the top 30 ecology journals and three high-impact multidisciplinary journals (Nature, PNAS, and Science), utilizing an automated content analysis (ACA) of 84,841 article abstracts, titles, and author keywords published over the last four decades. Journals clustered into 10 distinct groups based on 46 research themes identified by ACA. We examined the frequency of ecological themes in each of these journal groups to identify the journals most associated with each theme. We found three themes (anthropogenic impacts, disease, and traits) that occurred at a high frequency in the highimpact multidisciplinary journal group containing Nature, PNAS, and Science. Themes that increased in frequency over the last four decades, such as climate change, traits, anthropogenic, and cellular biology, were found more often in journals with higher impact factors, indicating that emerging research themes in ecology will likely become of interest to a broader readership over time. Our study provides a thematic review as a potential roadmap for junior ecologists to browse and publish journal articles.
Trends in Research on Forest Ecosystem Services in the Most Recent 20 Years: A Bibliometric Analysis
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Forest resources and the flow of ecosystem services they provide play a key role in supporting national and regional economies, improving people’s lives, protecting biodiversity, and mitigating the impacts of climate change. Based on the ISI (Institute of Scientific Information) Web of Science (WoS) database, we used a bibliometric approach to analyze the research status, evolution process, and hotspots of forest ecosystem services (FES) from a compilation of 8797 documents published between 1997 and 2019. The results indicated that: (1) research on forest ecosystem services has developed rapidly over the past 23 years. Institutions in the United States and other developed countries have significantly contributed to undertake research on the topic of ecosystem services. (2) The 11 hotpot key focus areas of completed research were payments for ecosystem services, biodiversity conservation, forest governance, ecosystem approaches, climate change, nitrogen, ecosystem management, pollin...
The journal Ecology is one of the premier journals in the field of ecology, published by the Ecological Society of America. Ten volumes of the journal containing 120 issues from 2003 to 2012 have been taken into consideration for the present study that carries out a bibliometric analysis of the 3,359 papers and 164,369 references of this journal. The analysis covers parameters like growth pattern, authorship pattern and author productivity, with most productive countries and institutions. Out of 3,359 contributions, only 410 were single-authored and the rest were multi-authored with a Collaboration Coefficient of 0.21. Applicability of Lotka’s Law has been tested. The most productive institution was the University of California at Davis, with 183 publications. The United States of America topped the list of countries with 2,188 papers, while South Africa occupied eighteenth position.
Scientometric Analysis of World Biodiversity Literature
The study presents the scientometric analysis of world biodiversity literature based on the publications indexed in the Web of Science Core Collection during the period from 1989 to 2016. Overall total 154654 records were retrieved. BibExcel toolbox and MS-Excel spreadsheet were used to analyze the data.Findings of the analysis revealed that relative growth rate of article contributions of biodiversity literature has shown a decreasing trend, whereas the doubling time for publications has shown increasing trend.The most prolific contributor in the field of biodiversity literature among the authors are Gastone, KJ gets the first rank with 257 (0.17%) publications.The multi authored papers rank first in order with a total of 139206 (90.01%) contributions and remaining 15448 (9.99%) contributions are from the single authors.The Chinese Academy of Sciences occupies the first rank among the top institutions contributing Biodiversity literature by contributing 2305 publications during the study period. It is also found that 24223 (15.66%) publications on world biodiversity literature did not receive any citations.