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Worldwide earthworm research: a scientometric analysis, 2000–2015

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Abstract

To understand the history and research status of earthworm, earthworm research citation data was collected from the Science Citation Index Expanded during the period from 2000 to 2015. Next, HistCite was used  to analyse the yearly output, country, institution, journal, citation impact and citation relationships in the field. Results indicated that the research of earthworm has increased during the studied 16-year period. The country with the highest research output was the USA, while the institution with the highest research output was the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The majority of articles and Total Location Citation Score (TLCS) values came from developed countries. Developed countries have more research advantages in this field than that of developing countries. The top three outputs journals were Soil Biology and Biochemistry, Pedobiologia and Applied Soil Ecology. The top 3 TLCS journals were the same as top outputs journals. Articles published with higher TLCS scores had a greater impact on the following research and played an important role in research development.

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Acknowledgments

We heartily thank our anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. The study was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 40871118), Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province, China (No. 8151064201000048), Special Project on the Integration of Enterprise-University Cooporation Project of Guangdong Province (No. 2010B090400453). Further, this work was funded by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of Jinan University (No. 21614375).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Natural Resources and Environment, South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou, 510642, People’s Republic of China

    Huimin Xiang & Jiaen Zhang

  2. Jinan University Library, Guangzhou, 510632, People’s Republic of China

    Qiandong Zhu

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  1. Huimin Xiang
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Correspondence to Jiaen Zhang.

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Xiang, H., Zhang, J. & Zhu, Q. Worldwide earthworm research: a scientometric analysis, 2000–2015. Scientometrics 105, 1195–1207 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-015-1725-0

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