Trends in Biodiversity Research — A Bibliometric Assessment

Abstract

Research on biodiversity has grown considerably during the last decades. The present study applies bibliometric methods to evaluate efforts in this field of study. We retrieved roughly 69,000 bibliographic records from the Web of Science database that matched the word biodiversity (and derivatives) in keywords, title or abstract. Article contributions and number of involved authors and journals increased exceptionally fast since the 1980s, when the term biodiversity was coined. But since the year 2008, a decelerated growth rate leads to an average rate of knowledge generation. Using the frequency of terms extracted from publication titles, we inferred that the community-level focus has increased in biodiversity studies, while molecular biodiversity is still not strongly represented. Climate-related topics are rapidly gaining importance in biodiversity research. The geographical imbalance between allocation of research efforts and distribution of biological diversity is apparent.