Rising slopes—Bibliometrics of mountain research 1900–2019

Abstract

Mountain areas provide essential resources for a significant proportion of the Earth’s population. This study presents the development of mountain research between 1900 and 2019 based on peer-reviewed articles in English listed in Web of ScienceTM (WOS). We analyzed the number of publications over time, journals and scientific categories, frequent topics, and geographical distributions based on 40 mountain ranges and authors’ countries as well as institutional contributions. From 1900–2019, 195k ±10% mountain research papers were published; over 50% from 2010–2019. While papers were published in more than 1000 different journals, indicating a wide range of disciplines engaged in mountain research, 94% of the papers were assigned to “Science & Technology”, only <5% to “Social Sciences” and “Arts & Humanities”. The most papers were written by researchers in the USA, followed by China. The number of papers per area or capita showed high variability across the investigated mountain ranges. Thus, geographically and disciplinarily more balanced research activities and better accessibility of knowledge about mountain regions are recommended.

The state of mountain research in Canada

“…Indeed, a targeted review by Hanly et al (In preparation) (1) focused on mountain-specific glacio-hydrological literature in Canada indicates that additional relevant articles can be identified when using detailed, topic-specific search syntax. Notwithstanding, our counts for included articles are consistent with a recent global scale bibliometric analysis of mountain research by Gurgiser et al (2022), which includes Canada; we therefore believe this review captures the majority or peer-reviewed articles explicitly focused on mountains in Canada, as well as a sizable proportion of studies that are incidentally relevant to mountains.…”

“…The remaining 14% of these researchers are associated with federal (75%) and provincial (25%) government agencies. No researcher from outside of Canada are included in the most active scholars category, a finding that differs from other geographies such as the Hindu Kush Himalaya, where many scholars are based outside of the region (Gurgiser et al 2022).…”

“…Indeed, no less that 2,888 studies examining mountains in Canada have been published in the peer-reviewed literature to date. This work represents several decades of substantial research effort and makes Canada one of the top 10 publishers of mountain research globally (Gurgiser et al 2022). However, research activities involving scholars from outside of Canada remain limited, nearly a quarter of existing studies were only incidentally focused on mountains systems, and an additional but unquantified amount of mountainrelevant literature remains peripheral to core debates in mountain research due to its omission of the word 'mountain' (i.e.…”