The scientific research on ecosystem services: A bibliometric analysis

Abstract

The scientific research on ecosystem services (ES) has grown substantially over the past ten years, making more evident the vital role played by natural ecosystems in support of human economy and well-being. Several studies showed that biodiversity represents a fundamental part of the Earth's life support system. Biodiversity considerably affects ecosystem functioning while contributing to the provision of different types of ES. The increasing ecological awareness of scientists, citizens, and policy makers on the importance of natural capital stocks and ES flows boosted nature conservation strategies and the development of more environmentally friendly production processes. In this study, we explored the global scientific literature on ES over the last thirty years. The software VOSviewer was used to create maps based on network data of scientific publications displaying relationships among scientific journals, researchers, and countries. Specific keywords were finally used to explore the co-occurrence of different terms connected to the research on ES. Results show that the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment had a major impact on the scientific literature dealing with the ES concept. The top country researching on ES was USA, while the top journal was Ecological Economics. In terms of co-occurrence, the top keywords were "biodiversity", "management", "conservation", and "climate change". This study identified the main research areas characterizing the scientific literature on ES. Social network analysis and maps based on network data make possible the application of systems thinking in bibliometric science. This type of analysis allows for the investigation of research development in specific fields of science, capturing the interdisciplinarity of research topics crossing the boundary of specific disciplines, as it is the case of ES.

Interrelations between construction ethics and innovation: a bibliometric analysis using VOSviewer

“…The bibliometric approach is valuable in this sense because it allows one to derive the essence of a research domain from a large amount of data. It enables the investigation of information structure, the development of research areas, and the capture of research subject interdisciplinarity (Pauna et al, 2018;Zou et al, 2018). Bibliometric analysis generates a map that reflects the evolution of a research field and the intellectual structure of a scientific domain.…”

Ecological impacts of invasive ecosystem engineers: A global perspective across terrestrial and aquatic systems

“…We then applied a quantitative analysis of bibliometric networks to the search results. This method has been widely applied in recent years and has proven to be a useful tool to detect patterns and emerging trends on a wide range of scientific topics as well as to identify their research gaps or needs (Pauna et al, 2018; Picone et al, 2021; Skaf et al, 2020). The co‐occurrence analysis (with a minimum of five occurrences per keyword) yielded a total of 258 terms.…”

African agricultural development: How are we contributing?

“…(2018), Pauna et al. (2018), and Türkeli et al. (2018) as examples of research using social network analysis to analyze “timely ecological topics,” while recent applications in economics include Alnajem et al.…”

“…First, patterns of interactions are important to proper understanding of observed behavior, second, improved understanding of how networks function has widened the scope of application, and third, data availability has improved considerably. Skaf et al (2020: 2) cite Buonocore et al (2018), Pauna et al (2018), andTürkeli et al (2018) as examples of research using social network analysis to analyze "timely ecological topics," while recent applications in economics include Alnajem et al (2021), Comerio and Strozzi (2018), Galofré-Vilà (2020), Lozano et al (2019, Xu et al (2021), Zhang et al (2020).…”