Climate Change Research in View of Bibliometrics

TL;DR

This bibliometric study analyzes 222,060 climate change research papers from 1980 to 2014, highlighting publication growth, major subfields, influential countries, and evolving research topics through quantitative and title word analysis.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive bibliometric mapping of climate change research, revealing publication trends, key subfields, and the geographic and thematic distribution of influential work.

Findings

Publication output doubled every 5-6 years.

Biomass and climate modeling are major subfields.

Research on adaptation and mitigation increased exponentially since 2005.

Abstract

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 published between 1980 and 2014. The total number of papers shows a strong increase with a doubling every 5-6 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. 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). 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. Finally, the term model and related terms prominently appear independent of time, indicating the high relevance of climate modeling.