[Sigmetrics] Climate Change Research in View of Bibliometrics

[David Wojick]

This is potentially very useful research because this area of science is so 
important to policy making. I have a small, bibliometric crude study here 
as well, but it is not published in a journal because I do not do that.
See my http://www.cato.org/blog/climate-modeling-dominates-climate-science

There are two basic findings, both using Google Scholar. First, of all the 
listed items in all of science that refer to modeling, about 55% also refer 
to climate change. This appears to be a huge concentration of modeling 
activity in a very narrow scientific domain. Second, of all the items that 
refer to climate change, about 97% also refer to modeling. It thus appears 
that climate science is dominated by this concentration of modeling. In my 
judgement the validity of this concentration and dominance is where much of 
the debate comes from.

We need more research into this critical science & policy area.

David

David Wojick, Ph.D.
David E. Wojick Associates

At 03:45 AM 8/1/2016, Robin Haunschild wrote:
>Dear Colleagues,
>
>you might be interested in our bibliometric study on climate change
>research which we present in this open access paper:
>
>Climate Change Research in View of Bibliometrics
>
>by Robin Haunschild, Lutz Bornmann, and Werner Marx
>
>This bibliometric study of a large publication set dealing with research
>on climate change aims at mapping the relevant literature from a
>bibliometric perspective and presents a multitude of quantitative data:
>(1) The growth of the overall publication output as well as (2) of some
>major subfields, (3) the contributing journals and countries as well as
>their citation impact, and (4) a title word analysis aiming to
>illustrate the time evolution and relative importance of specific
>research topics. The study is based on 222,060 papers (articles and
>reviews only) published between 1980 and 2014. The total number of
>papers shows a strong increase with a doubling every 5­6 years.
>Continental biomass related research is the major subfield, closely
>followed by climate modeling. Research dealing with adaptation,
>mitigation, risks, and vulnerability of global warming is comparatively
>small, but their share of papers increased exponentially since 2005.
>Research on vulnerability and on adaptation published the largest
>proportion of very important papers (in terms of citation impact).
>Climate change research has become an issue also for disciplines beyond
>the natural sciences. The categories Engineering and Social Sciences
>show the strongest field-specific relative increase. The Journal of
>Geophysical Research, the Journal of Climate, the Geophysical Research
>Letters, and Climatic Change appear at the top positions in terms of the
>total number of papers published. Research on climate change is
>quantitatively dominated by the USA, followed by the UK, Germany, and
>Canada. The citation-based indicators exhibit consistently that the UK
>has produced the largest proportion of high impact papers compared to
>the other countries (having published more than 10,000 papers). Also,
>Switzerland, Denmark and also The Netherlands (with a publication output
>between around 3,000 and 6,000 papers) perform top—the impact of  their
>contributions is on a high level. The title word analysis shows that the
>term climate change comes forward with time. Furthermore, the term
>impact arises and points to research dealing with the various effects of
>climate change. The discussion of the question of human induced climate
>change towards a clear fact (for the majority of the scientific
>community) stimulated research on future pathways for adaptation and
>mitigation. Finally, the term model and related terms prominently appear
>independent of time, indicating the high relevance of climate modeling.
>
>The paper is published by PLOS ONE and available here:
>http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0160393
>
>Feedback is greatly appreciated!
>--
>Dr. Robin Haunschild
>Max Planck Institute
>for Solid State Research
>Heisenbergstr. 1
>D-70569 Stuttgart (Germany)
>phone: +49 (0) 711-689-1285
>fax:   +49 (0) 711-689-1292
>email: R.Haunschild at fkf.mpg.de
>http://www.fkf.mpg.de/ivs
>
>
>
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