Assessing ecological restoration as a research topic using bibliometric indicators

A bibliometric analysis was performed to evaluate the global scientific production on ecological restoration from the period of 1997 to 2017. This analysis was based on online database of Science Citation Index Expanded – Web of Science© and a total of 3297 publications was retrieved. The analysis comprised seven main aspects: (1) publication activity, (2) Web of Science categories, (3) journals, (4) countries, (5) authors, (6) organizations and (7) keywords. The results indicated that the annual publications on ecological restoration study have recently increased. The USA play an important role as they have published highly in this field and have been the most frequent partner in international collaborations. American researchers have accumulated most of the publications. The Chinese Academy of Science is the emblematic organization, with 363 published papers. The Restoration Ecology and Ecological Engineering are the two most used journals to disseminate results. The major related research areas are “Environmental Science Ecology”, “Forestry” and “Biodiversity Conservation”. Studies about “restoration”, “pinus ponderosa”, “climate change”, “biodiversity” and “ecosystem services” have become the main subject of research along the years. Analyses of keywords suggested that there is a relatively lack of information about “soil” and “tropical ecosystems” among the analyzed studies. Overall, this framework proved to be effective to evaluate the recent research trends and to contribute with researchers and governments on management and decision-making on science.