A Bibliometric Analysis of Forest Gap Research during 1980–2021

Abstract

(1) Background: Forest gaps play an important role in promoting forest regeneration and facilitating the forest growth cycle. Since the 1980s, forest gaps have been widely studied by forestry scientists. The purpose of this study was to review the global literature from 1980 to 2021, based on the scientific database Web of Science Core Collection, and to summarize the research hotspots and the trends of the forest gaps. (2) Method: A bibliometric analysis was performed using the visual analytic software CiteSpace to quantify the description of annual publications, collaboration analysis of authors, institutions and countries, co-citation analysis of cited journals, cited authors, and cited references. The keyword co-occurrence, burst, and time zone were also analyzed by the software. (3) Results: The results show that the volume of annual publications is increasing. Dr. Harald Bugmann is the author with the most published works. The most active institution is the American Forest Service. The United States, Canada, and China are the three most productive countries. “Ecology” is the most cited journal. The results indicate that the hotspot in the forest gap research has shifted, and the effects of forest environmental changes caused by forest gaps under climate change have received more attention from scientists. In the future, more attention may be paid to the role of forest gaps on near-natural forest management patterns, the effect of forest gaps on forest sustainable development, and the way to study forest gaps using lidar technology. (4) Conclusion: Our results can help to understand emerging trends in forest gap research to inform forest ecology and management.

Research trends in the environmental assessment of poplar plantations in Hungary: A bibliometric analysis

“…Generally, for the period 1936-1980, the number of publications was flat at around 1-2 articles/year and then increased gradually until 1990 and increased significantly after 1990 (Figure 2). Referring to Xie et al (2023), the research trends can be divided into the initial, rapid, and deep development stages based on annual publication numbers. In this research, the initial stage was the period 1936-1980, the development stage was 1980-1990, and the rapid publication stage was 1990-2023.…”

“…Bibliometric analysis in the forestry sectors has been applied to describe specific research trends, such as ecosystem services (Di Franco et al, 2021;Zhang et al, 2019), forest degradation (Aleixandre-Benavent et al, 2018), agroforestry practices (Leal et al, 2019), climate change (Araujo et al, 2023;Nam et al, 2022;Zhang et al, 2022), forestry big data (Gao et al, 2022), and forest bioeconomy (Jankovský et al 2021;Verma and Ghosh, 2023). Analyzing and mapping the bibliography can also use software such as the Bibliometrix R package (Gao et al, 2022;Zhang et al, 2022), Citespace (Li et al, 2022;Xie et al, 2023), and VOSviewer (Cheng et al, 2021;Hamidah et al, 2020;Singh, 2022;Soegoto et al, 2022). Each software package has advantages and disadvantages; therefore, the researcher's preference is essential in choosing the suitable bibliography analysis software.…”