Who Is Mapping the Pamirs? A Review on Plant and Vegetation Sciences

Abstract

This paper is part of the aim to set up a literature and knowledge database for research on plants and vegetation in the Pamirs. The author reviewed the history of plant and vegetation sciences, including exploration during the Russian colonization, the Soviet era, and the post-Soviet era. The core part of this article is a quantitative bibliometric analysis, which focuses on the main subjects and the main contributors in this field, today and in the past. Particularly, the publishing landscapes of the czarist, Soviet, and the post-Soviet period were compared, and interconnections between authors from the Soviet Union and/or post-Soviet countries with authors from other countries were revealed. It could be shown that the importance of the different research subjects did not change considerably, that the number of authors per paper increased in the post-Soviet period, which includes many coauthorship relations between authors from post-Soviet and other countries, and that authors and institutions from the post-Soviet countries are still the most productive.