The changes in zoological publication rates and focal subdisciplines between 1960 and 2022

作者：Tianbao LUO, Liyu LI, Qian Wang, Wentong LIU, Jinyu Guo, Yimei Yan, Newman CHRIS, Youbing Zhou, Jin Zhao · 发表于：Integrative Zoology · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1111/1749-4877.12883 · 被引用次数：7 · 研究领域：Species Distribution and Climate Change、Computational and Text Analysis Methods、Data Analysis with R

Abstract Since ancient times, zoology, as the branch of biology dealing with animals, has been a cornerstone of natural science and has developed substantially over the last century. We conducted a bibliometric analysis using structural topic modeling (STM) to determine changes in the representation of principal zoological subdisciplines in the literature between 1960 and 2022. We collated a corpus of 217 414 articles from 88 top‐ranked zoology journals and identified three main fields: (i) ecology, (ii) evolution, and (iii) applied research. Within these, we identified 10 major subdisciplines. The number of studies published per year grew from 118 in 1960 to 6635 in 2022. Macroscale‐related subdisciplines increased while classical and traditional subdisciplines decreased. Mammals (34.4%) and insects (18.1%) were the dominant taxa covered, followed by birds (15.2%) and fish (8.0%). Research on mammals, insects, and fish involved a broad range of subdisciplines, whereas studies of birds focused on ecological subdisciplines. Most publications were from the United States, followed by the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Australia, China, and Japan, with two developing countries, China and South Africa among the top 15 countries. There were different subdiscipline biases between countries, and the gross domestic product of each country correlated positively with its publication output ( R 2 = 0.681). We discuss our findings in the context of advances in technological innovations ...