Trends and potential cautions in food web research from a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Understanding food webs is important and useful for planning environmental conservation, management and restoration. However, research on food webs is not uniform globally; it tends to be concentrated in specific areas or ecosystem types, and would hinder our understanding of food webs and ecosystem processes. This study examined the trends in food web research over the past decades by analysing publication data from Web of Science; in particular, it focused on the ecosystem types studied, countries in which the studies were done, and which countries collaborated on the studies. A total of 20,239 publications were examined. The results showed that research on food webs has dramatically increased since the 1990s. Most publications related focused on aquatic ecosystems.

The effects of dams on macroinvertebrates: Global trends and insights

“…Some models, such as the Australian Rivers Assessment System (AUSRIVAS; Marchant & Hehir, ; Nichols, Norris, Maher, & Thoms, ), the index of biotic integrity (Quist & Schultz, ; Rehn, ; Santucci, Gephard, & Pescitelli, ), and Test Site Analysis‐based models (Meissner, Carr, Phillips, & Lindenschmidt, ; Phillips, Davies, Bowman, & Chivers, ), have been built to assess river integrity and health conditions. In addition, stable isotope technology is proving to have a vital role in studies of ecosystem energy flow and nutrient recycling (Fry, ; Souza et al, ; Tao et al, ). For example, stable isotopes were utilized to assess changes in the food web structure after dam construction (Okuda et al, ).…”

“…In light of the rapid growth of global dam construction (Benstead, March, Pringle, & Scatena, ; Schmutz & Sendzimir, ), this comprehensive overview can help to identify trends and hotspots and would therefore benefit the related ecosystem restoration efforts and biodiversity conservation in the future. Bibliometric analysis is an effective way to identify trends, hotspots, and disadvantages in a wide range of disciplines (Ding, Chen, Ding, & Tao, ; Ho, ; Nakagawa et al, ; Padilla, Marisa, & Francisco, ; Tao et al, ; Wu et al, ), and therefore, it can specifically provide countermeasures for macroinvertebrate conservation in dammed rivers. In this bibliometric study, we aimed to answer the following questions: (1) What is the area of greatest focus on this topic and how has the topic evolved during the last hundred years?…”

Aquatic macrophytes and trophic interactions: a scientometric analyses and research perspectives

“…In temperate countries, the interest in aquatic interactions and cascading effects has emerged as one of the central issues to reduce the formation of phytoplankton biomass (Carpenter et al, 1985) since the first successful studies carried out by Shapiro et al (1975). Interpreting food web and the trophic cascades consisted in understanding the role of aquatic vegetation in the processes that mediate interactions, especially in the tropics where few studies has been developed (Jeppesen et al, 2012).…”

“…Studies on aquatic trophic webs are not abundant in South America. Such research is important for the advancement of theoretic and applied aquatic ecology and an essential step to the management, planning and restoration environments (Tao et al, 2015).…”

Trends and perspectives on the use of social network analysis in behavioural ecology: a bibliometric approach

“…Bibliometric approaches include objective measures of the content of a given research field. Recent examples within ecology and evolution include bibliometrics of conservation physiology (Lennox & Cooke, 2014), food web research (Tao et al, 2015), and disease ecology (Manlove et al, 2016). The intention of bibliometrics is to extract specific aspects of a research to assess, track, and analyze the status, gaps, and trends within a research field.…”