Trends in research on wood forest products: a bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Considering that the global trade in forest timber products is prominent, academia needs to obtain directions for future research on forest timber products. This study aims to identify the trends and growth of publications on timber forest products, identifying driving, emerging, or crosscutting themes. The database used is Scopus, the search terms were "wood forest products" and "timber products" and the period was from 1955 to 2022. The bibliometric method was applied, using the Bibliometrix package and the interface Biblioshiny, from the R software. The results show that 89.06% of the 1,007 studies returned come from the USA, Canada, and China and that most of the publications are concentrated in three international journals. Themes that have recently emerged, such as climate change mitigation, bioeconomy, climate change, carbon stocks, plywood, biomass, and international trade, indicate a trend and suggest possible gaps to explore in future research. The contributions of this study are in the identification of driving and emerging/transversal themes that can direct future research on wood forest products, as well as already consolidated themes that no longer represent research trends. The limitations, on the other hand, are related to the collection of data only in the Scopus database and the quantitative analysis of topics based only on keywords contained in parts of the documents. Future studies may go beyond trend analysis, performing co-authorship analyses, examining authors and their affiliations, and studying the social structure and collaboration networks. They may undertake citation analysis, using citation counts as a measure of similarity between documents, authors, and journals.