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Tropical Ecology 59(3): 431–443, 2018

© International Society for Tropical Ecology www.tropecol.com
ISSN 0564-3295

Global research trends in ‘Ecology’: A scientometric analysis

ANWESHA BORTHAKUR1* & PARDEEP SINGH2

1Centre for Studies in Science Policy, J awaharlal Nehru University (J NU),
New Delhi-110067, India
2Department of Environmental Studies, PGDAV College, University of Delhi,
New Delhi-110065, India

Ab str a ct: Ecological research has observed a near constant growth during the past few decades. Considering the significance and diversity of ecological research with regard to both its vastness and specificity, this paper is an attempt to map out the research activities in ‘ecology’ through a ‘scientometric analysis’ of the world research outputs. The aim was to identify and document the historical and current research trajectories in the subject. We recognize the fact that in the absence of an in-depth analysis of the trends in research, it is utterly possible that some areas of research get more than adequate attention from the global research and policy community while some equally important areas of the subject remain completely unaddressed or neglected. The study was carried out using two major databases – Scopus and SCImago for the 21 years period from 1996 to 2016 by means of a defined scientific method. Among the several interesting observations, we have found that apart from China, no countries and research institutes from the global south are listed among the top 10 research producing countries/institutes on ecology. Considering the fact that majority of the ecologically sensitive areas and biodiversity hotspots of the world are located in the developing world and have significance influences on the ecological processes across the globe, this calls for immediate attention from the research community. During the keyword analysis, the frequent appearance of ‘restoration ecology’ and ‘landscape ecology’ among the keywords could be considered a positive development in the ecological research. Finally, we argue that it is essential for the global research community to appropriately identify both the gap and opportunities in research on ecology and holistically address concerns of ecological significance.

Key w or d s: Bibliometrics, ecology, ecological research, scientometric analysis, trends.

In tr od u ction

‘environmental science’ has emerged as an important focus area for the global research and policy community (Table 1). Accordingly, ‘ecology’,

The

  • scientific
  • study
  • addressing
  • the

interactions that decide the abundance and distribution of organisms is known as ‘ecology’ (Krebs 1972). Prof. Eugene P. Odum (1953), popularly known as the father of modern ecology, defined ecology as ‘the study of structure and function of nature’. With growing concerns on the environment during the past few decades,

  • as
  • a
  • central subject category within the

environmental science realm, has attained an increasing research attention from the scientific community across the globe. Broadly divided into two basic categories – ‘fundamental’/ ‘basic’ and ‘applied’ ecology – the researches on the subject is both essential and significant towards under-

*Corresponding Author; e-mail: [email protected]

  • 432
  • GLOBAL TRENDS IN ECOLOGICAL RESEARCH

Ta b le 1. Country-wise distribution of overall research in ‘Environmental Science’ during 1996-2016 (Source: SCImago 2018).

Rank
1
Country
United States China United Kingdom Germany Canada
Documents
470621 219409 134007 106899
90369 80012 73849 73484 73369 63273 59101 43460 39483 33675 33403 29262 28681 26170 25707 23038 23022 21356 20990 20798 20386
Citations
9962559 2327649 3132493 1995033 1904667
844142
1496355 1074437 1540612 1301472 1047193 1135221
500692 854016 476006 278096 745728 208968 356273 367716 205007 490307 469312 561757 427699
Citations per document
21.17
23
10.61 23.38

  • 4
  • 18.66

56
21.08

  • 10.55
  • India

  • 7
  • Australia

J apan
20.26

  • 8
  • 14.62

  • 9
  • France
  • 21.00

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

  • Spain
  • 20.57

  • Italy
  • 17.72

Netherlands Brazil
26.12 12.68
Sweden South Korea Poland
25.36 14.25
9.50
Switzerland Russian Federation Turkey
26.00
7.99
13.86
Taiwan Iran
15.96
8.90
Belgium Norway
22.96 22.36
Denmark Finland
27.01 20.98

standing the ‘nature’ and its processes. Further, researches on ecology are also imperative towards attending to the ever-degrading state of the environment and associated concerns in the present-day world such as the climate change. While ‘fundamental/basic ecology’ is primarily the study of diversity and interactions between organisms and their biotic/abiotic environments, ‘applied ecology’ is typically inspired by a welldefined specific objective in order to resolve environmental tribulations, including the natural resource management, in terms of biodiversity, energy, land, or food (Courchamp et al. 2015).
Today, ecology is not an isolated entity. As argued by Enquist et al. (2017): “As humans

continue to drive 21st century global environmental change, ecologists are striving to meet the challenges of social and environmental sustainability. For ecology to inform environmental policy formulation and management, new partnerships between ecologists and users of ecological research must be developed. To be effective, these partnerships require

  • a
  • collective commitment to applying scientific

knowledge to specific decisions that aim to solve complex environmental problems today and into the future”.

Translational ecology, for instance, takes both scientists and stakeholders collectively in order to

  • develop
  • research
  • addressing
  • environmental

confrontations (Hallett et al. 2017). It highlights the decision-making and social contexts wherein an ecological question is raised, with the aim of creating actionable science in order to attend to intricate environmental concerns (Lawson et al. 2017). Engaging accomplices with diverse perspectives have the potential to augment the quality and applicability of science, nonetheless dissimilarities in contributor incentive structures can cause major challenge to the partnership (Hallett et al. 2017). Historical ecology, on the other hand, encompasses human-environmental interactions with millennial, centennial, and decadal research focus with the repercussions of these associations in the formation of present-day landscapes (Armstrong

  • BORTHAKUR & SINGH
  • 433

et al. 2017). Further, chemical ecology encourages an evolutionary and ecological understanding of the origin and the function of chemicals interfering exchanges between and within organisms (Herve et al. 2018).
Considering the significance and diversity of ecological research with respect to both its vastness and specificity, this paper is an attempt to evaluate the historical and recent trends in science and technology, 3) information systems on science and technology, and 4) socio-organizational and cognitive structures in science and technology (van Raan 1997). It had gained increasing attention from the research community for the past several decades because of its capacity to contribute towards a holistic understanding of the literature in a particular subject area.
By presenting an overview of a research area from a meta-perspective, scientometrics aids in the development and progress of an academic discipline by serving as a fundamental basis for debating and defining the future agendas of research (Hussain 2017). Thus, it is elemental to carry out a scientometric analysis in order to realize the current trends in researches on a particular topic of concern which may aid the experts to locate the possible gaps in the literature. Subsequently, it has policy implications as it helps in directing research on a particular topic towards uncharted dimensions and assist in the allocation of both funds and resources. In the present milieu of biodiversity loss and global change, there is an escalating demand for advanced predictive power in the context of ecology, both in the science-policy interface and scientific literature, towards increasing knowledge and, thus, a better decision-making (Maris et al. 2018).

  • research activities in ‘ecology’ through
  • a

‘scientometric analysis’ of the research publication outputs. Accordingly, in the subsequent sections, we provide an overview of ‘scientometric analysis’ and its significance in ‘ecological research’. This is followed by methodology involved in this research with the primary research questions. Subsequently,

  • a
  • detailed description of the

country-, journal-, year-, institute-, author-wise distribution of current ecological research has been documented along with the occurrence of keywords

  • towards
  • identifying
  • possible
  • gaps
  • and

opportunities. Finally, we conclude our key findings with future scope for possible actions.

Scientometric analysis: a background

Before going to the depth of this paper, it is indispensable to recognize the relevance and

  • significance
  • of
  • a
  • scientometric
  • analysis.

Scientometrics is ‘the science of measuring and analyzing science, technology and innovation’ (Hussain 2017) in terms of their scientific outputs and the impact of diverse scientific findings. Modern scientometrics is essentially rooted on the landmark work of Derek de Solla Price and Eugene Garfield, who is the creator of widely used Science Citation Index. During the 1960s and 1970s, the use of scientometric indicators in research evaluation had emerged primarily in the United States followed by a range of European countries as a reaction from the scientific community itself who, by then, had become gradually more aware of the apparently uncontrolled growth of scientific literature and information throughout the post-war period (Leydesdorff 2004). As a consequence, it had become important to identify and acknowledge the research activities in a particular area in order to keep a track of the scientific actions. Scientometric is essentially designed for the study of every single aspect of the literature on science and technology (Hood & Wilson 2001). It is a field of applied science with its core activities of research falling under these four interconnected areas: 1) indicators of science and technology, 2) the interaction between

Significance of a scientometric analysis for ecological research

It has been observed that, although there is a considerable amount of publications in the form of journal articles, conference proceedings, books, book chapters, etc. published consistently addressing various issues of ecological concern, the historical and current ‘trends of research’ within the subject area of ‘ecology’ remain mostly unaddressed. As Keville et al. (2017) argue,

“although the broad field of ecology and its role in understanding the distribution and diversity of life on earth is a central part of the natural sciences, there is currently no comprehensive ranking of academic institutions for this discipline, which has quadrupled in research volume and visibility over the past three decades”.

  • A
  • few noteworthy

examples of attempts to evaluate the trends of ecological research include the work by Kim et al. (2018) which evaluated over 100 years of publications by the Ecological Society of America and Livingston et al. (2016) which review the global disparity of ecological sciences. There are a

  • 434
  • GLOBAL TRENDS IN ECOLOGICAL RESEARCH

few other studies which focus on the topic and effectively attempt to provide an overview of the trends in research on ecology. Yet, further scopes for addressing the topic still exist. are arranged based on the number of documents that they produced during the 21 years of our study.

Meth od ology

We had carried out a preliminary search with the top ten journals of ‘ecology’ as listed in the Scopus database in order to look for publications on the ‘trends of development of researches in ecology’. These ten journals were – 1) Forest Ecology and Management, 2) Ecology and Evolution, 3) Ecological Modelling, 4) Science of the Total Environment, 5) Ecological Indicators, 6) Journal of Applied Ecology, 7) Marine Ecology Progress Series, 8) Restoration Ecology, 9) Chinese Journal of Applied Ecology, 10) Chinese Journal of Ecology. The results of the search revealed a handful of articles on the trends of ecology research published during the 21 years from 1996 to 2016. There are certainly scopes for further publications on the topic in order to provide a clear picture of ‘where ecological research is heading today and where is the gap in existing studies’. With less than adequate focus on the historical and present trends of overall ecological research, it is possible that some areas of research get more than enough attention from the global research and policy community and some equally important areas of the subject remain unaddressed or ignored. Such a situation is both concerning and worrisome where most of the research attentions are diverted to some specific areas while disregarding some other important issues on the topic.
This relative dearth of studies on the historical and present trends of researches in ecology, particularly in some major journals of the subject, has been a motivation for us to take up this research. This kind of study may aid the ecologists to observe the inclination of the research community and direct their researches accordingly. In this paper, we have taken ‘ecology’ (as defined within the broader realm of ‘environmental science’) as our subject area and attempted to have a comprehensive overview of the research activities associated to it in the present-day context. Table 1 outlines the researches on overall ‘environmental science’ with a country-wise distribution from 1996 to 2016. This provides an impression on the broader area of environmental science research within which ecological research in an integral component. The total number of documents produced by a single country during that period, the citations achieved by the country and average citation per document offer an idea of the general research activities on the subject. In the table, the countries
The data for our study has primarily been obtained from two major sources – Scopus1 and SCImago2. The study was carried out for 21 years

  • from 1996 to 2016 in order to provide
  • a

comprehensive overview. Covering approximately 22,600 titles across various disciplines, Scopus ranks as the most prevalent citation and abstract database of peer-reviewed literature in the form of

  • books,
  • scientific
  • journals
  • and
  • conference

proceedings with feature to visualize, track and analyze research. It brings about an inclusive outline of the world’s research output in areas ranging from science, technology, social sciences, medicine, to arts and humanities3. The SCImago J ournal & Country Rank, on the other hand, is an openly accessible portal that comprises of the country and journals-specific scientific indicators developed from the information contained in the Scopus database. These indicators are used to evaluate and analyze various scientific domains. J ournals covered in the SCImago are categorized with respect to the subject area (27 major thematic areas), subject category (313 specific subject categories) or by country. There is citation data obtained from over 5,000 international publishers with their more than 21,500 journal titles and performance metrics from 239 countries globally4.
In SCImago, we used the subject area
‘environmental science’, followed by two subject categories within the same – 1) ‘Ecology’ and 2) ‘Ecological Modeling’. In Scopus, we used ‘ecology’ as the keyword in order to include all possible publications on the topic. Nevertheless, we are aware of the fact that there exist a number of terms with the word ‘ecology’ associated with it such as industrial ecology, political ecology among several others. Our research aim, however, had been to involve only those articles which are associated with ‘environmental science’ research. Accordingly, while carrying out the analysis in Scopus, we had limited our search to the ‘subject area’ of ‘environmental science’ towards narrowing down the results obtained and removing the papers which are of no relevance in the context of

1

https://www.scopus.com/home.uri https://www.scimagojr.com/ https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/scopus http://www.scimagojr.com/aboutus.php

234

  • BORTHAKUR & SINGH
  • 435

our study. We essentially seek to address topics such as plant and animal ecology, agro ecology, forest ecology, tropical ecology, soil ecology, geo ecology, aquatic ecology, conservation, landscape ecology and such other topics akin to other associated areas.
As a part of this scientometrics study towards understanding the current research performances and trends in ecology, following queries were primarily formulated and subsequently addressed in this paper:
Accordingly, it is very likely that although the works of these ecologists are categorized under their host or affiliating countries, they contribute significantly to the ecological knowledge of their own country. In this process, the knowledge is cocreated together by the global North (where the researcher is essentially based/hosted) and the global South (where the researcher is originally from). Such comprehensive approaches often provide valuable insights.

1. What are the historical and present trends of researches as illustrated by the available academic literature on ecology?
2. Which are the pioneering countries in this field of research?

R esu lts a n d d iscu ssion

Countries

While analyzing the country-wise distribution of research on ecology, we had used two subcategories within the broader subject area of environmental science i.e. 1) ‘Ecology’ (Table 2) and 2) ‘Ecological Modeling’ (Table 3). The rationale behind selection of ecological modeling as a sub category is to further narrow down the search results and to have an essence of research activities within the field of ecology. The United States of America has been a pioneer in global ‘ecology’ research, producing an overwhelming 136,871 research documents during the 21 years period from 1996 to 2016. The country has an incredible 27.16 citations per research document. During the same duration, the second ranked China produced 42780 research papers on the topic. Although the USA produced over three times the number of papers than that of China, the constant emergence of the country as a future leader in the field of ecology and overall environmental sciences is worth mentioning. The United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and Australia, ranked third, fourth, fifth and sixth respectively, had published between 20,000 and 30,000 research papers on ecology. Complementing the overall researches on ecology, ecological modeling too
3. Which are the core journals allocating considerable portion of literature on the topic?
4. How is the year-wise distribution of research activities in the field in terms of the research attention from the global research and policy community?
5. What is the productivity distribution of various research institutes worldwide in the field?
6. Who are the prominent authors contributing significantly in the development of the topic and what are their affiliating institutes? In the country-wise distribution of research on ecology, the country (or countries) of affiliation of the authors is taken as the central factor. If there are authors affiliated to institutions from more than one country involved in a particular paper, all the countries are taken into consideration in Scopus while listing that particular paper. Accordingly, the paper finds a place within all the countries it has an author from. It is an inclusive process of acknowledging the contribution of a country irrespective of the base of the corresponding or the senior-most author. In today’s increasing collaboration and mobility of researchers among diverse countries, this could be considered as a constructive effort of ensuring impartial recognition. The mobility of the researchers from one country to other further raises concerns about their exact fieldwork area. We especially acknowledge the fact that many students from the Global South seek universities overseas to undertake their higher degrees, especially at postgraduate, doctoral and postdoctoral level. For instance, countries like the United States, Australia and the European Union member states host a large number of international students undertaking their studies at different level. Many of the projects that these ecologists work on are carried out in their home countries or somewhere else in the world. a

  • shows
  • a
  • similar pattern in country-wise

distribution. While the first ranked USA produced 12035 research papers on the topic, the second ranked China had generated 3405 research documents within the same period. The ranking of the top five countries are exactly the same and the difference in the number of publications with the USA is considerably high.
It is noteworthy that apart from China, no countries from the global south are listed among the top 10 research producing countries on overall ecology. However, majority of the ecologically sensitive areas and biodiversity hotspots of the

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  • Elevating the Impacts of Research in Agricultural Education

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    Journal of Agricultural Education, 61(2), 249-262 https://doi.org/10.5032/jae.2020.02249 Elevating the Impacts of Research in Agricultural Education James R. Lindner,1 Amy Harder2, and T. Grady Roberts3 Abstract Dissemination of research is a critical part of the research process. Researchers in agricultural education have long embraced this process. However, the Internet has changed the ways in which research is disseminated, with the potential for much broader impacts around the world. The purpose of this study was to provide a benchmark of the current impact of research in agricultural education by examining how journals and researchers in the field fare on commonly used research metrics. It was concluded that many of the common journals in agricultural education are not even listed in the indices that provide metrics to assess journals. It was also concluded that many researchers in agricultural education are not taking steps to provide public profiles of their research and thus do not have individual researcher metrics. In some ways, we are invisible to the broader scientific community. Practical suggestions are provided to elevate the reputations of our journals and the reputations of our researchers. Keywords: research; journals; metrics; impacts; academics Author Note: Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to James Lindner, Professor Agriscience Education, Auburn University, AL 36849; email: [email protected] Introduction There is perhaps nothing that defines and ties together the agricultural education discipline more than the concept of change. For our purposes, we are using agricultural education as an inclusive term to describe our broader discipline that includes faculty in teacher education, extension education, agricultural communications, and agricultural leadership.
  • Preprints in Scholarly Communication: Re-Imagining Metrics and Infrastructures

    Preprints in Scholarly Communication: Re-Imagining Metrics and Infrastructures

    publications Article Preprints in Scholarly Communication: Re-Imagining Metrics and Infrastructures B. Preedip Balaji 1,* and M. Dhanamjaya 2 1 Indian Institute for Human Settlements Library and School of Library and Information Science, REVA University, Bengaluru 560064, India 2 School of Library and Information Science, REVA University, Yelahanka, Bengaluru 560064, India; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected]; Tel.: +91-080-6760-6661 Received: 2 September 2018; Accepted: 8 January 2019; Published: 14 January 2019 Abstract: Digital scholarship and electronic publishing within scholarly communities change when metrics and open infrastructures take center stage for measuring research impact. In scholarly communication, the growth of preprint repositories as a new model of scholarly publishing over the last three decades has been one of the major developments. As it unfolds, the landscape of scholarly communication is transitioning—with much being privatized as it is made open—and turning towards alternative metrics, such as social media attention, author-level, and article-level metrics. Moreover, the granularity of evaluating research impact through new metrics and social media changes the objective standards of evaluating research performance. Using preprint repositories as a case study, this article situates them in a scholarly web, examining their salient features, benefits, and futures. Moves towards scholarly web development and publishing on the semantic and social web with open infrastructures, citations, and alternative metrics—how preprints advance building the web as data—is discussed. We determine that this will viably demonstrate new metrics and, by enhancing research publishing tools in the scholarly commons, facilitate various communities of practice. However, for preprint repositories to be sustainable, scholarly communities and funding agencies should support continued investment in open knowledge, alternative metrics development, and open infrastructures in scholarly publishing.
  • Common Ground in the Global Quest for Open Research

    Common Ground in the Global Quest for Open Research

    OSI POLICY PERSPECTIVES COMMON GROUND IN THE GLOBAL QUEST FOR OPEN RESEARCH OSI POLICY PERSPECTIVE 2 APRIL 2020 EDITION OPEN SCHOLARSHIP INITIATIVE ABOUT OSI POLICY PERSPECTIVES The OSI Policy Perspectives series offers broad, common ground perspectives on key issues in scholarly communication. Each report summarizes the current state of a particular issue and what we know about it, and also attempts to articulate the per- spectives and lessons of experience from all stake¬holder groups in scholarly communication on this issue (particularly but not exclusively as expressed in OSI conversations) and identify what common ground might exist for building broadly acceptable policy. OSI is not a democratic body that speaks with one voice on any particular issue. Trying to reconcile the views, intentions, and motivations of all the different actors, communities and groups in the scholarly communication space—which are very rarely entirely aligned—is challenging. We acknowledge, therefore, that these reports may be (and in fact, probably are) an imperfect reflection of the many perspectives and ideas in this group. The fact that these reports sometimes need to be published in a rush, in response to policy commenting deadlines and other pressures only makes this imperfection more likely. We also acknowledge, however, that OSI often considers a wider range of perspectives than established policy making bodies in scholarly communication, and that our relative strength is showcasing this range of perspectives and noting how they differ, and importantly, how they share common ground. To this end, we hope it is valuable to produce these reports, however imper- fect, and share them with the scholarly communication community and beyond.
  • Bias Against Novelty in Science: a Cautionary Tale for Users of Bibliometric Indicators

    Bias Against Novelty in Science: a Cautionary Tale for Users of Bibliometric Indicators

    Bias against Novelty in Science: A Cautionary Tale for Users of Bibliometric Indicators Jian Wang1, Reinhilde Veugelers2 and Paula Stephan3 1 KU Leuven 2 KU Leuven, Bruegel and CEPR 3 Georgia State University and NBER April 2016 ABSTRACT Research which explores unchartered waters has a high potential for major impact but also carries a higher uncertainty of having impact. Such explorative research is often described as taking a novel approach. This study examines the complex relationship between pursuing a novel approach and impact. Viewing scientific research as a combinatorial process, we measure novelty in science by examining whether a published paper makes first time ever combinations of referenced journals, taking into account the difficulty of making such combinations. We apply this newly developed measure of novelty to all Web of Science research articles published in 2001 across all scientific disciplines. We find that highly novel papers, defined to be those that make more (distant) new combinations, deliver high gains to science: they are more likely to be a top 1% highly cited paper in the long run, to inspire follow on highly cited research, and to be cited in a broader set of disciplines. At the same time, novel research is also more risky, reflected by a higher variance in its citation performance. In addition, we find that novel research is significantly more highly cited in “foreign” fields but not in its “home” field. We also find strong evidence of delayed recognition of novel papers and that novel papers are less likely to be top cited when using a short time window.
  • PREVALENCE of POTENTIALLY PREDATORY PUBLISHING in SCOPUS on the COUNTRY LEVEL 1 Prevalence of Potentially Predatory Publishing in Scopus on the Country Level

    PREVALENCE of POTENTIALLY PREDATORY PUBLISHING in SCOPUS on the COUNTRY LEVEL 1 Prevalence of Potentially Predatory Publishing in Scopus on the Country Level

    PREVALENCE OF POTENTIALLY PREDATORY PUBLISHING IN SCOPUS ON THE COUNTRY LEVEL 1 Prevalence of Potentially Predatory Publishing in Scopus on the Country Level Tatiana Savinay∗ Ivan Sterligovy y National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia ∗Russian Foundation for Basic Research, Moscow, Russia. [email protected] [email protected] F Abstract—We present results of a large-scale study of po- of various degree of competence as well as by tentially predatory journals (PPJ) represented in the Scopus researchers themselves [Leydesdorff et al., 2016]. database, which is widely used for research evaluation. Both In short, research evaluation has become substan- journal metrics and country/disciplinary data have been evalu- tially more formalized relying on various indicators, ated for different groups of PPJ: those listed by Jeffrey Beall which are mostly based on publication and citation and those discontinued by Scopus because of “publication con- counts. This metrics explosion is partially attributed cerns”. Our results show that even after years of discontinuing, hundreds of active potentially predatory journals are still highly to the priorities of many nations and organizations visible in the Scopus database. PPJ papers are continuously to reproduce the success of world leaders in science produced by all major countries, but with different prevalence. and technology. Most ASJC (All Science Journal Classification) subject areas In this paper, we provide a bird’s eye view of the are affected. The largest number of PPJ papers are in engineer- growth of articles in potentially predatory journals ing and medicine. On average, PPJ have much lower citation (PPJ), a global phenomenon stemming from both metrics than other Scopus-indexed journals.