Paradigm shifts in forestry and forest research: a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Forestry literature often suggests that the scope of forestry and forest research has changed though there is limited empirical evidence to support this hypothesis. We used a bibliometric approach to quantify changes in word frequency in titles of documents in the Web of Science category forestry. Single words and word pairs (bigrams) were extracted from a total of 150,679 documents across 651 sources that spanned between 1956 - 2019. We identified increasing and decreasing trends in word frequency, identified influential documents, and examined country of origin. The number of documents published in forestry research has increased annually, with the United States, Canada and China producing the highest quantities. The most influential documents in the dataset involved methodology, stand development and climate change. Word frequencies revealed a shift in research away from sustained yield-based forestry and towards a more interdisciplinary view of forests as ecologically important, dynamic systems. We argue that changes in research trends reflect a broader paradigm shift toward sustainable forest management.

The Digital Forest: Mapping a Decade of Knowledge on Technological Applications for Forest Ecosystems

“…Research on technological applications for urban forest ecosystem management was not prominent in this study, although our trend analysis did show more uptake starting in 2018. This trend is corroborated by other bibliometric reviews (Larouche et al., 2019; Polinko & Coupland, 2021), highlighting an increase in research output on urban ecosystems attributed to urbanization processes and urban population growth, spurring interest in urban sustainable development. With the recognition that cities are playing increasingly important roles in climate change adaptation and mitigation, as well as sustainable development more broadly, urban forest and other urban green infrastructure practitioners will be called upon to more efficiently and effectively plan and manage these resources to support broader sustainability and resiliency objectives (Elmqvist et al., 2015; Endreny, 2018).…”

The Role of Genetics in Domestic Research on Forestry Issues: A Text Mining Analysis

“…This aspect can be said to be overlooked and covered by other issues that directly impact the forestry sector. Economic aspects, sustainability and climate change that have been studied previously are issues that have attracted much interest from forestry scholars [11][12] [13]. Especially in Indonesia, limited funding and regulatory restrictions in sharing research resources with the global community are the main obstacles of genetics research [17].…”

“…A text mining analysis conducted by Schober et al [12] revealed three phases of changes in sustainable forest management research issues between 1990-2016, which were the phase of exploration of general concepts of forest management, forestryfocused issues, and climate change-focused issues. Polinko and Coupland [13] revealed that there was a shift in research from issues based on sustainability to the broader term of forestry during analyzing research articles published between 1966-2019. Zhao et al [14] have applied data mining techniques to find out trends in research topics in the forestry sector.…”

Introduction: Ten Years of Forests, Trees and Agroforestry Research in Partnership for Sustainable Development

“…Finally, the SDG framework allows the discussion to return full circle to issues of governance, the local and global commons, and synergy between agriculture and forestry in the food, energy, water and income nexus (Mbow et al 2014;van Noordwijk et al 2018b;Rosenstock et al 2019;van Noordwijk 2019). In the process the understanding of forests (Moeliono et al 2017;de Royer et al 2018;Polinko and Coupland 2021), trees (Leakey 2014;Cloke and Jones 2002) and agroforestry (van Noordwijk et al 2016a) has evolved: theories of change can lead to changes of theory. People-centric nature-based land restoration through agroforestry will, for example, have to be tenure responsive (van Noordwijk et al 2020a;McLain et al 2021).…”