What's hot and what's not – Identifying publication trends in insect ecology

Abstract

Research disciplines in science have historically developed in silos but are increasingly multidisciplinary. Here, we assessed how the insect ecology literature published in ecological and entomological journals has developed over the last 20 years and which topics have crossed discipline boundaries. We used structural topic modelling to assess research trends from 34 304 articles published in six ecology journals and six entomology journals between 2000 and 2020. We then identified and compared topics that emerged from the entire body of literature, or corpus, with topics that emerged from a subsection of articles that focused only on insects (insect corpus). We found that, within the entire corpus, topics on ‘Community ecology’, ‘Traits, life history & physiology’ and ‘Ecological methods & theory’ became more prevalent over time (hot topics), whereas ‘Population modelling’, ‘Insect development’, ‘Reproduction & ontogeny’ and ‘Plant growth’ declined in prevalence over the 20 years we surveyed (cold topics). In the insect corpus, we found that hot topics included ‘Thermal tolerance’ and ‘Disease vectors’, whereas cold topics included ‘Herbivore phenology’, ‘Insect‐plant interactions’ and ‘Parasitoids and parasites’. ‘Landscape ecology’ was a growth topic area for both corpora. Our findings suggest that insect‐related research is a major component of the broader ecological discipline, and there are topics in ecology where insect research aligns with general ecological trends. However, specific topics unique to the insect corpora – such as insect taxonomy – are fundamental to both insect and ecology research.

Trends in animal translocation research

“…To determine the main topics in our corpus, we used structural topic modelling (STM) to analyse abstracts and titles using the ‘stm' package (Roberts et al 2019) in R. When fitting a topic model, the researcher must specify the number of topics to find in the corpus. After trialling 60 and 20 as the number of topics, we chose 30 topics; a number that we judged to be enough to provide a good overview of the corpus whilst not being too large to interpret (Andrew et al 2021).…”

“…Topic modelling, a type of machine learning, is unsupervised and does not impose topics as identified by authors. This approach allows research categories to emerge that may not be revealed by traditional meta‐analyses and systematic reviews (Westgate et al 2015, Andrew et al 2021, Evans et al 2021a). Through post‐hoc analyses of the fitted model, topic modelling allows researchers to interrogate topic popularity, trajectory, similarity and generality.…”

Trends in Austral Ecology publications 2021 and 2022

“…We hope to incentivize potential authors to assess the publication trends over the last 2 years and identify opportunities in their research for future publication in Austral Ecology. Our study adds to the rich datasets that we have collected on the topic popularity (Westgate et al, 2020) and manuscript rejections (Andrew, 2020) in Austral Ecology, as well as publication trends more broadly (Andrew et al, 2022).…”

It Is a Wild World in the City: Urban Wildlife Conservation and Communication in the Age of COVID-19

“…Unfortunately, invertebrate biodiversity continues to diminish in urban settings [24], a loss primarily abetted by apathy toward this important component of ecosystems. Whereas ecology journals have shown an increase in studies of community ecology, including in urban settings, the term "urban" did not emerge as important in entomological journals [25].…”