A bibliometric review on carbon cycling research during 1993–2013

Abstract

This study explores a bibliometric approach to quantitatively review carbon cycling research and statistically assess its developments and trends during 1993-2013. Articles referencing carbon cycling from the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED) database were analyzed by accessing the following: publication pattern by year, publication performance by country and institution, publication performance by journal, linguistic diversity, publication type, and keyword analysis. Results show USA was the leading country in carbon cycling research (contributing 47 % to worldwide publication) while China showed a marked increase in past 10 years. Europe has the most countries that are actively involved in carbon cycling research. The Chinese Academy of Sciences was the No. 1 most productive institution in the world and contributed 51 % to papers accomplished by China. Topics identified in this study, such as climate change, soil respiration, Arctic region, increased in popularity during the past 20 years. Research techniques such as remote sensing, eddy covariance, and radiocarbon are more frequently used in carbon cycling research in recent times.Although topics such as carbon dioxide and methane are still vital to climate change research, their relative popularities (compared to other topics) declined over the past two decades, indicating more diverse topics (such as decomposition, respiration, Arctic, fire, etc.) will be investigated in the coming decade. Uncertainty assessment achieved an overall 80 % similarity in keywords analysis and demonstrated that within a given research field (carbon cycling in this case), the bibliometric analysis is mostly robust to the uncertainty in choosing keywords.

Characteristics and development trends of ecohydrology in lakes and reservoirs: Insights from bibliometrics

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“…It has become an important field in the digital age (Desai, Veras, & Gosain, 2018). This type of analysis has been widely used to quantitatively and qualitatively assess the scientific output or research patterns of authors, periodicals, countries, and research institutions (Liu, Zhang, & Hong, 2011;Zhi et al, 2015). The Science Citation Index (SCI) Expanded database is the most comprehensive and commonly used data source for evaluating scientific development, research hot spots, and future research directions (Braun, Schubert, & Kostoff, 2000;Tan, Fu, & Ho, 2014;Zhang, Yao, & Qin, 2016).…”

Water Optics and Water Colour Remote Sensing

“…Bibliometrics, which was first introduced by Pritchard [1], has been widely used to quantitatively and qualitatively analyse scientific production and research trends at the decade to century scale with a large amount of data [2]. Using the Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCI-Expanded, where SCI is the multidisciplinary database of the Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia, PA, USA) database of the Web of Science and "bibliometric analysis" as the topic, 1502 papers could be searched by the end of 2016.…”

A critical review of the development, current hotspots, and future directions of Lake Taihu research from the bibliometrics perspective

“…Bibliometrics, which was first introduced by Pritchard (1969), has been widely used to quantitatively and qualitatively analyze scientific production and research trends at the decade to century scale with a large amount of data (Zhi et al 2015). Using the Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCI-Expanded) database of Web of Science and "bibliometric analysis" as the topic, 1213 papers covering 109 subject categories could be searched by the end of 2015.…”

“…Using the Science Citation Index-Expanded (SCI-Expanded) database of Web of Science and "bibliometric analysis" as the topic, 1213 papers covering 109 subject categories could be searched by the end of 2015. For example, in environmental science, this method has been used to study wetland (Zhang et al 2010a, Zhi andJi 2012), global climate change (Li et al 2011, Pasgaard andStrange 2013), carbon cycling (Zhi et al 2015), phosphorus research in eutrophic lakes , and other subjects. In summary, bibliometric analysis is focused on certain study subjects in most cases but is seldom focused on a certain study region (Wang et al 2015).…”