TITLE:
Trends in Biodiversity Research — A Bibliometric Assessment
AUTHORS:
Hendrik Stork, Jonas J. Astrin
KEYWORDS:
Scientometrics, Bibliometrics, Biodiversity Literature, Title Word Analysis, ISI Web of Knowledge
JOURNAL NAME:
Open Journal of Ecology,
Vol.4 No.7,
May
26,
2014
ABSTRACT: Research on biodiversity has grown considerably during the last decades.
The present study applies bibliometric methods to evaluate efforts in this
field of study. We retrieved roughly 69,000 bibliographic records from the Web
of Science database that matched the word biodiversity (and derivatives) in
keywords, title or abstract. Article contributions and number of involved
authors and journals increased exceptionally fast since the 1980s, when the
term biodiversity was coined. But since the year 2008, a decelerated growth
rate leads to an average rate of knowledge generation. Using the frequency of
terms extracted from publication titles, we inferred that the community-level
focus has increased in biodiversity studies, while molecular biodiversity is
still not strongly represented. Climate-related topics are rapidly gaining
importance in biodiversity research. The geographical imbalance between
allocation of research efforts and distribution of biological diversity is
apparent.