Abstract
Honey bee research is believed to be influenced dramatically by colony collapse disorder (CCD) and the sequenced genome release in 2006, but this assertion has never been tested. By employing text-mining approaches, research trends were tested by analyzing over 14,000 publications during the period of 1957 to 2017. Quantitatively, the data revealed an exponential growth until 2010 when the number of articles published per year ceased following the trend. Analysis of author-assigned keywords revealed that changes in keywords occurred roughly every decade with the most fundamental change in 1991–1992, instead of 2006. This change might be due to several factors including the research intensification on the Varroa mite. The genome release and CCD had quantitively only minor effects, mainly on honey bee health-related topics post-2006. Further analysis revealed that computational topic modeling can provide potentially hidden information and connections between some topics that might be ignored in author-assigned keywords.
Highlights
Western honey bees, Apis mellifera, are of interest due to their beneficial products and impact on food security [1,2]
The release of the sequenced genome of Apis mellifera [13] facilitated new tools, which may have triggered a surge in fundamental research on honey bee health and biology [14]
We applied text-mining to the current and investigate potential confidence intervals of these transitivityaggregate values suggested theyknowledge were significantly different from each research trends in the research field literature related to
Summary
Apis mellifera, are of interest due to their beneficial products and impact on food security [1,2]. Their role as general pollinators and the easy mobility of large colonies with thousands of worker bees make them an indispensable component of modern agricultural systems [2,3]. They are an attractive scientific model to study caste development, haplo-diploidy, eusociality, symbolic language, and many other fundamental scientific topics [4,5]. The release of the sequenced genome of Apis mellifera [13] facilitated new tools, which may have triggered a surge in fundamental research on honey bee health and biology [14]. The quantitative and qualitative consequences for the scientific output of honey bee research and sub-disciplines are unclear
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