A bibliometric analysis of scientific trends in phytoplankton research

Abstract

-We summarize the scientific trends in phytoplankton studies between 1991 and 2013 based on bibliometric analysis. The annual publication output on phytoplankton demonstrated a rapid linear increasing tendency during the past two decades, and its contribution to total scientific articles remained below 10%. Under the context of fast scientific research development, the yearly numbers of dependent publications (in terms of multi-aquatic ecosystems and international collaborations) indicate a linear increasing trend. The variations of keywords associated with research regions are mainly contributed by geographic adjacent countries, which are also generally the top contributors. Various trends of all the keywords relating to research methods, research contents and environmental factors indicate that phytoplankton studies carried out on large scale and long term are showing a significantly ascending trend, while traditional and local scale studies are showing a descending trend.

The global scientific literature on applications and trends in the use of functional morphological groups in phytoplankton studies

“…Studies on phytoplankton communities increased significantly in the global scientific literature (Carneiro et al, 2008;Wang et al, 2015), and therefore the systematic mapping of literature is relevant to determine trends and biases in the development of research (e.g., Pullin & Stewart, 2006;Nabout et al, 2015), as well as direct future studies. Here, we found an increase in the number of ecological surveys using the MBFG approach over the years, following the same temporal trend of total scientific production on phytoplankton in freshwater.…”

“…Besides, at least three groups of keywords co-occur, evidencing trends in ecological studies of phytoplankton in the current scenario and the applying MBFG, especially about eutrophication issues, climate change, and ecosystem functioning. These trends reflect the importance of the effects of biodiversity and how it affects the ecosystem (Isbell et al, 2018), and this has called the attention (Wang et al, 2015). For example, warming and eutrophication are essential global change factors for natural ecosystems (Binzer et al, 2016).…”

“…Also, countries such as Uruguay and China have excellent researchers in this area of knowledge, directly influencing the development of research in phytoplankton ecology and, consequently, in the application of MBFG (for example, Carla Kruk, the principal author of the original MBFG manuscript, is from Uruguay). As the 15th country in the world with the most extensive scientific production on phytoplankton (Carneiro et al, 2008), China is in the top 20 countries for publications on phytoplankton and cooperation correlations (Wang et al, 2015).…”

Determining reference conditions of hemiboreal lakes in Latvia, NE Europe: a palaeolimnological approach

“…The water quality in freshwater systems is primarily dependent on material loading through hydrological processes within watersheds (Wang et al, 2015). Agricultural and forest clearance activities around the lakes lead to soil erosion amplification that can be recognised as increased mineral matter content in sediment.…”

BibeR: A Web-based tool for bibliometric analysis in scientific literature

“…BibeR, a web-based application, is designed to make it easier for individual researchers to perform 50 bibliometric analysis and visualization interactively, characterized with a friendly and easy user-interface, cross-51 platform, free of installation, open sourced and flexible functions with the supports benefited from R developer 52 community. Before the born, bibliometric researches have been done by using the prototype of BibeR (Guo et al,53 2015; Nabil Majdi, 2015; Wang et al, 2015). In this paper, we proudly introduce BibeR to readers, and hope to 54 draw attentions from both of users and developers worldly.…”