Abstract
With the economic progress and scientific development since the 1980s, research on deserts in China has advanced remarkably. Many research outputs have been published, especially in recent years. However, a systematic review and quantitative analysis of these publications has been lacking. Here, we conducted a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of the main deserts in China in order to characterize the trends and temporal changes in publications. Because the first publication was found in 1986, we searched all publications from 1986 to 2020. We found that annual publication output increased exponentially, especially after 2012, and that the Tengger Desert, the Taklimakan Desert, and the Horqin Sandy Land were the most intensively studied areas. Earth science, involving environmental science and ecology, geology, and agriculture were the major research fields. In addition, Journal of Arid Land, Chinese Science Bulletin, and Catena were the journals with the largest number of publications. The Chinese Academy of Sciences produced the largest number of publications, wherein, Li X R, Zhao X Y, and Zhang Y M were the three most productive authors. Noticeably, “climate change” has become a frequent topic since 2010, indicating that more attention has been paid to climate change and alleviating anthropogenic disturbances in desert areas in China. Although Chinese authors contributed the most publications, the average number of citations per publication for Chinese authors was relatively low. Our results highlight that authors should continue to improve the number of citations of their publications and pay more attention to the interactions between climate change and desertification in the deserts research of Northern China in the futures.
Highlights
Due to economic development and governmental support, research on deserts in China has made tremendous progress over the past 30 years (Wang, 2009; Li et al, 2017)
We divided the annual output into three rising periods: 1) ready-to-grow period: steady with slight rising from 1986 to 2000 with 58 publications totally; 2) steady growth period: publications were risen to 563 during 2001–2010, with an average annual growth rate of 87%; 3)
Explosive growth period: there were 1,957 publications from 2011 to 2020, with nearly 200 papers published per year
Summary
Due to economic development and governmental support, research on deserts in China has made tremendous progress over the past 30 years (Wang, 2009; Li et al, 2017). As the progress of computer technology, quantitative reviews represented by bibliometric analysis has become a powerful tool to conduct systematic and transparent reviews of a specific research field by processing a large number of publications (Borgman and Rice, 1992; Bornmann and Mutz, 2015). This methodology provides detailed information on the annual outputs, temporal evaluation of key words, dominant research areas, marked journals, and the institutions and authors involved in the research (Wallin, 2005; Aria and Cuccurullo, 2017). We used the ggplot R package (Wickham, 2016) to visualize the results
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