Abstract
Scientists often debate on the evolving state of their fields and future research directions, but empirical studies on research trends are rare and this limits our capacity to disentangle perceptions from facts within the mass of available data. We used ecological and paleolimnological approaches to assess how the “community” of words most commonly used in limnological studies presented at the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) meetings and published in Web of Science have evolved over the last decades. We found that the field of limnology has become increasingly focused on global abiotic research themes, especially in rivers, while there was a decrease in the proportion of organismal studies. We hypothesize that this results from both major influential publications highlighting the importance of framing limnology in a global context and the methodological limitations of organismal studies that prevent data from scaling up as quickly as their abiotic counterparts.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 204-211 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| Journal | Limnology And Oceanography Letters |
| Volume | 5 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We are grateful to the Schneider group and all contributors to ASLO meetings for building and providing such an exciting database to analyze. We thank Andr?anne Dupont for help with data analysis in early stages of this effort. We also thank Roxane Maranger, Paul del Giorgio, Yves Prairie, as well as members of the Lapierre lab for stimulating discussions on past, current, and future trends of limnology, as well as speculations on the causes for past trends and potential directions of future trends that could not be objectively included in the current study. Lapierre is funded by an NSERC-Discovery grant and Maisonneuve is funded by FRQNT.
Funding Information:
We are grateful to the Schneider group and all contributors to ASLO meetings for building and providing such an exciting database to analyze. We thank Andréanne Dupont for help with data analysis in early stages of this effort. We also thank Roxane Maranger, Paul del Giorgio, Yves Prairie, as well as members of the Lapierre lab for stimulating discussions on past, current, and future trends of limnology, as well as speculations on the causes for past trends and potential directions of future trends that could not be objectively included in the current study. Lapierre is funded by an NSERC‐Discovery grant and Maisonneuve is funded by FRQNT.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 The Authors. Limnology and Oceanography Letters published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography.