A bibliometric analysis for global research trends on ectomycorrhizae over the past thirty years

Published date06 August 2018
Pages733-749
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/EL-05-2017-0104
Date06 August 2018
AuthorXu Jiang,Liu Yanbin
Subject MatterInformation & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet
A bibliometric analysis for
global research trends on
ectomycorrhizae over the
past thirty years
Xu Jiang
Library Department, Northeast Forestry University, Harbin, China, and
Liu Yanbin
Forestry Research Institute of Heilongjiang Province, Harbin, China
Abstract
Purpose Based on the signicance of ectomycorrhizae(ECM) and increased publication activity on this
subject, it was decided to carry out a bibliometric analysis of scientic outputs in this area. The purpose of
this study is to reveal the research trends of scientic outputs on ECM for the past 30 years and provide a
potentialguide for future research.
Design/methodology/approach A method of bibliometric analysis was performed, based on the
online version of the Science Citation Index Expanded, Web of Science, from 1986 to 2017. The authors
evaluated the publication types, languages, source countries, journals, the patterns of publication outputs,
most-cited articles, most-productive authors, institutional distributions, subject categories, high-frequency
keywords and keywords plus and high-frequencyterms in the title and abstract of ectomycorrhizal research.
Keywords, keywordsplus and high-frequency terms in the title andabstract were analyzed via VOSviewer to
illustratethe extent of co-occurrence. This study further describes the recentresearch priority or hotspots and
revealsthe research trends.
Findings From 1986 to 2017, the publicationoutput on ECM showed a rising trend; the number of articles
has rapidly increased after 2003.Based on co-occurrence analysis for keywords, keywords plus and terms in
the title and abstract, ectomycorrhizal fungiis the most popular keyword and keywords plus;
concentrationis the most high-frequency terms in the title and abstracts. Plant biology, mycology and
ecology are the hotspots in the ectomycorrhizal research. Ectomycorrhizal taxonomy, the molecular
mechanismsof ectomycorrhizal symbioses and the common mycorrhizalnetworks are the future direction.
Originality/value A bibliometric analysis has beencarried out to analyze the trends of ECM research
with 30 years.This study provides a potential guide for future researchrelated to ectomycorrhizae.
Keywords Co-occurrence analysis, Bibliometrics, Research trends, Ectomycorrhizae,
Literature-based discovery
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Mycorrhizal associations were a key to the colonization of terrestrial habitats by plants
(Brundrett, 2002). For land plants as a whole, 80 per cent of the recorded species and 92
per cent of the families are mycorrhizal (Wang and Qiu, 2006). One group of mycorrhizal
associations, the ectomycorrhizae (ECM), are particularly important to their hosts in
boreal and temperate forest ecosystems where competition for available nutrients is very
high (Smith and Read, 2008;Courty et al., 2010). Ectomycorrhizae forms a sheath around
the root and penetrates into the cortex but remains intercellular, forming the Hartig net
Global research
trends on
ectomycorrhizae
733
Received11 May 2017
Revised4 August 2017
30August 2017
7November 2017
Accepted4 December 2017
TheElectronic Library
Vol.36 No. 4, 2018
pp. 733-749
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0264-0473
DOI 10.1108/EL-05-2017-0104
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0264-0473.htm
(Peterson et al., 2004). If the fungus can form a bigger or more diverse network, its
chances of survival are better, says Suzanne Simard, who rst put forward the term
wood-wide-webof symbiotic mycelia in the journal Nature (Whiteld, 2007). Evidence
that mycorrhizal fungal mycelia can link plants together in a network, and that this
mycorrhizal network (Martos et al., 2009) can facilitate fungal colonization or interplant
transfer of compounds has intrigued scientists for decades (Simard et al., 2012;
Albarracín et al., 2013;Toju et al., 2016). Ectomycorrhizal networks provide a wide range
of services to plants and ecosystems. The most important one is probably nutrient uptake
and transfer (Simard et al., 2015;Shantz et al., 2016;Sponseller et al., 2016), followed by
seedling support (Simard et al., 2012), other functions, such as the prevention of nutrient
leaching (Heijden and Horton, 2009), internal cycling of nutrients (Callesen et al., 2013),
plant competition (Barto et al., 2011,2012) and so on. At present, ecosystem change
caused by human activities is one of the pivotal issues in ecological research.
Ectomycorrhizal fungi are potentially excellent indicators of the effects of these activities
because of the large number of species, their specialized life style and their important
ecological function (T
oth and Barta, 2010).
Ectomycorrhizae attracts more and more researchersattention nowadays, and many
scientic articles related to ECM have also been published (Yahr et al., 2016;Treu and
Falandysz, 2017). Bibliometrics, the application of mathematical and statistical techniques
to the study of publishing and professional communication, is a helpful scienceto master in
many elds (Caglar et al., 2016). As measurement of the quality of scientic publication,
bibliometrics, expressed through various indicators, has become very important for
researchers and organizations. For researchers, bibliometric indicators are important
because they allow objective measurements of the diffusion and the impact of the articles
published by a particular journalamong the scientic community (Froghi et al., 2012). There
are three types of bibliometric indicators: Quantity indicators measure the productivity of a
particular researcher or research group. Performance indicators measure the quality of a
journal, researcher or research group. Structural indicators measure connections between
publications, authors or research elds (Joshi, 2014). Analysis of the data obtained from
these citations can be used to indicate trends in research productivity over time (Huffman
et al.,2013;Kolle, 2017;Zyoud et al., 2017). A topic search was performed that contained
these words –“ectomycorrhizae and bibliometricor ectomycorrhizal and bibliometricor
ectomycorrhizas and bibliometric”–in the Web of Science (WoS). The results showed no
publications contained the keywords.So we thought it was necessary for the summary and
the prospect of ectomycorrhizae research with bibliometric methods at present. Our
objective was to evaluate trendsin global ectomycorrhizas research publications from 1986
to 2017, aiming to reveal the yearly scientic publication output, publication type, source
countries, source journals,most productive authors and most productive institutionsand co-
occurrence analysis on keywords, keywords plus and high-frequency terms in title and
abstract was to shed new light on future research trends.
Data sources and methodology
The data for the present study are derived from the core collection of Thomson Reuters
database of the Web of Science on October 30, 2017, which indexed 12,026 major journals
with citation references across 234 scientic disciplines (including Science Citation Index
Expanded (SCIE) and Social Science Citation Index (SSCI)) in 2015 according to the Journal
Citation Reports (JCR). Comparedwith other databases, such as PubMed, its records provide
more comprehensive coverage of the ectomycorrhizal literature. I performed the following
retrieval operations TS = (ectomycorrhizae or ectomycorrhizal or ectomycorrhizas);
EL
36,4
734

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