An overview of forestry journals in the period 2006–2010 as basis for ascertaining research trends

Articles published between January 1, 2006 and December 31, 2010 in 42 forestry journals (N = 16,258) were collected and, depending on their content and key words, classified in one of 22 sub-disciplines. Among the forestry sub-disciplines, the following are currently dominant: Mensuration and inventories, Forest management, Plant ecophysiology and Wood science. PCA ordination was used to visualize grouping tendencies and data separation. For each component, a number of characteristics contributed to the total variation, and significant importance was attached to those with the highest loading factors. The first component included Mensuration and inventories, Plant ecophysiology, Vegetation ecology and Forest management, as the highest loading factors. The second components comprised Sociological aspects, Plant ecophysiology, Wood science and Forest management. The most pronounced increase trend over the five-year period is noted for Genetics and breeding, Vegetation ecology, Fuels and energy, while the most pronounced decrease trend is visible in Forest health, Forest fire, Sociological aspects and Forest products. PCA suggests the existence of three groups of journals: the first group comprises Forest Ecology and Management and Canadian Journal of Forest Research, the dominating two, the second group comprises Annals of Forest Science, Plant Ecology, Tree Physiology and Trees-Structure and Function, while the rest of the journals belong to the third group. The Canadian Journal of Forest Research is the most diversified, while Tree Genetics and Genomes, Silvae Genetica and Tree-ring Research are narrowly specialized.

[1]  M. Krott,et al.  Identifying policy change — Analytical program analysis: An example of two decades of forest policy in Bangladesh , 2012 .

[2]  Thomas Wohlgemuth,et al.  Trend words in ecological core journals over the last 25 years (1978–2002) , 2004 .

[3]  T. Diamond,et al.  Establishing a Core List of Journals for Forestry: A Citation Analysis from Faculty at Southern Universities , 2003 .

[4]  Ang Li,et al.  Research on the semantic-based co-word analysis , 2011, Scientometrics.

[5]  Yuh-Shan Ho,et al.  A bibliometric analysis of world volatile organic compounds research trends , 2010, Scientometrics.

[6]  J. Helms.  Forest, Forestry, Forester: What Do These Terms Mean? , 2002 .

[7]  J. Alavalapati,et al.  Socioeconomic research in agroforestry: a decade in review , 2005, Agroforestry Systems.

[8]  David B. Lindenmayer,et al.  Climate change, conservation and management: an assessment of the peer-reviewed scientific journal literature , 2009, Biodiversity and Conservation.

[9]  Jeffrey C. Stier,et al.  The impact of interdisciplinary research in the environmental sciences: a forestry case study , 2000, J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci..

[10]  S. Holmgren,et al.  Research on forest policy in Sweden – Review , 2012 .

[11]  Gherardo Chirici.  Assessing the scientific productivity of Italian forest researchers using the Web of Science, SCOPUS and SCIMAGO databases , 2012 .

[12]  A. Brambrink,et al.  Publications on paediatric anaesthesia: a quantitative analysis of publication activity and international recognition. , 2000, British journal of anaesthesia.

[13]  A. Mather,et al.  The relationships of population and forest trends , 2000 .

[14]  Johann Hofherr,et al.  Mapping the research on aquaculture. A bibliometric analysis of aquaculture literature , 2011, Scientometrics.

[15]  Yuh-Shan Ho,et al.  A bibliometric and citation analysis of stroke-related research in Taiwan , 2007, Scientometrics.

[16]  Amit X Garg,et al.  Systematic review and meta-analysis: when one study is just not enough. , 2008, Clinical journal of the American Society of Nephrology : CJASN.

[17]  I. N. Sengupta.  Three new parameters in bibliometric research and their application to rerank periodicals in the field of biochemistry , 1986, Scientometrics.

[18]  Elizabeth A. Corley,et al.  35 years and 160,000 articles: A bibliometric exploration of the evolution of ecology , 2009, Scientometrics.

[19]  Jerome K. Vanclay,et al.  Ranking forestry journals using the h-index , 2007, J. Informetrics.

[20]  G. Hickey,et al.  Crossing disciplinary boundaries in forest research: An international challenge , 2005 .

[21]  Yuen-Hsien Tseng,et al.  A comparison of methods for detecting hot topics , 2009, Scientometrics.

[22]  Arden White,et al.  Increasing field complexity revealed through article title analyses , 1991, J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci..

[23]  Trends in research and collaboration in the Canadian Model Forest Network, 1993–2010 , 2012 .

[24]  Peter McDonald,et al.  The literature of forestry and agroforestry. , 1996 .

[25]  Xianwen Wang,et al.  Tracing scientist’s research trends realtimely , 2012, Scientometrics.

[26]  Jerrold H. Zar,et al.  Field and laboratory methods for general ecology , 1984 .

[27]  Pete Bettinger,et al.  The Key Literature of, and Trends in, Forest-Level Management Planning in North America, 1950–2001 , 2004 .

[28]  Jing Zhang,et al.  Assessment of world aerosol research trends by bibliometric analysis , 2008, Scientometrics.

[29]  魏屹东,et al.  Scientometrics , 2018, Encyclopedia of Big Data.

[30]  Charles D. Kolstad,et al.  Research Trends and Opportunities in Environmental and Natural Resource Economics , 1998 .

[31]  Tindaro Cicero,et al.  What is the appropriate length of the publication period over which to assess research performance? , 2012, Scientometrics.

[32]  Gordon M. Hickey,et al.  Quantifying the research impact of the Sustainable Forest Management Network in the social sciences: a bibliometric study , 2010 .

[33]  Yuen-Hsien Tseng,et al.  Journal clustering of library and information science for subfield delineation using the bibliometric analysis toolkit: CATAR , 2013, Scientometrics.