Bibliometric analysis of Journal of Plant Ecology during 2017–2021 Open Access

Journal of Plant Ecology (JPE) was founded in 2008. It is sponsored by the Botanical Society of China and the Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and published by Oxford University Press, UK. JPE publishes diverse types of articles that fall into the broad scope of plant ecology, including plant ecophysiology, population ecology, community ecology, ecosystem ecology, landscape ecology, conservation ecology, evolutionary ecology, theoretical ecology and global change ecology.

JPE has transferred to fully Open Access since July 2021, making the full text freely available for readers and authors. JPE serves as an important medium for plant ecologists worldwide to publish their research findings. Here, we present a bibliometric analysis (Aria and Cuccurullo 2017) to visualize the publication statistics and the document network of research papers published in JPE during 2017–2021.

The raw dataset was downloaded from the Web of Science Core Collection on 18 October 2022, including the fields author, title, journal title, cited frequency, abstract, address, affiliation, publication type, author keywords, keywords plus, Web of Science category, research field, references and the number of references. The raw data were manually cleaned, duplicated and items not related to research (4 editorials, 3 corrigenda, 2 commentaries and 1 data paper) removed, resulting in 472 items (466 research articles and 6 review articles) that could be further analyzed. All analyses were conducted using R v.4.2.1 (R Core Team 2022).

Publication overview of JPE

During 2017–2021, JPE published an average of 96 articles annually and had an acceptance rate of 28.2% (Table 1). From the start of JPE in 2008 up to the study period, both the number of submissions and the number of published articles tripled (Schmid et al. 2018; Zhang et al. 2020c). In addition to the traditional research and review papers, JPE has also published data papers, method papers as well as perspective and commentary papers (Fig. 1).

Most productive authors, countries and institutions for papers published in JPE

During 2017–2021, a total of 1890 authors published their works in JPE. The 10 most prolific authors come from three different countries and six of them obtained more than 100 citations (Table 2a). Among all articles, 229 are from institutions in China, accounting for 48.5% of the total publications in the journal. These articles received 1365 citations (Table 2b).

The authors of articles published in JPE during 2017–2021 are from 618 institutions. The top 10 institutions in terms of number of publications are shown in Table 2c. The Chinese Academy of Sciences system is the most productive institution, which includes the University of Chinese Academy Sciences, Institute of Botany, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research and Institute of Applied Ecology. It is then followed by Peking University and the University of Zurich (Table 2c).

Most cited articles of JPE

The 10 most cited papers among the published papers in JPE during 2017–2021 and 2020–2021 are presented in Table 3. Among the first set, most papers were published in 2017, and two were published in 2018 (Gioria et al. 2018; Rodrigues et al. 2018) (Table 3a). In particular, the special issue on ‘Biodiversity–Ecosystem Functioning’ in 2017, including 24 research articles and 1 editorial, received high citations. Six articles from this special issue ranked among the 10 most highly cited papers from 2017–2021 (Bu et al. 2017; Huang et al. 2017; Li et al. 2017; Schmid et al. 2017; Scholten et al. 2017; Sun et al. 2017). To evaluate the performance of recently published papers in JPE, we also analyzed the 10 most highly cited articles within the past 2 years (2020–2021; Table 3b). Two articles published during this period are included in top 10 list for the entire period 2017–2021 with citation-per-year values of 7.33 (Li et al. 2020) and 6.50 (Liu et al. 2021), respectively.

Co-occurrence network of keywords

The co-occurrence network of KeyWords Plus in JPE was generated using the ‘biblioNetwork’ function in the ‘bibliometrix’ package (Aria and Cuccurullo 2017) (Fig. 2). The definition of KeyWords Plus by Web of Science is that ‘KeyWords Plus are index terms automatically generated from the titles of cited articles. KeyWords Plus terms must appear more than once in the bibliography and are ordered from multi-word phrases to single terms. KeyWords Plus augments traditional keyword or title retrieval.’ (Web of Science Core Collection Help; https://images.webofknowledge.com/images/help/WOS/hp_full_record.html). In the co-occurrence network, a total of 50 keywords are displayed based on the points’ relative position (Singh et al. 2022) and grouped into four clusters. The red zone (Cluster 1) indicates the diversity theme, the green zone (Cluster 2) represents the climate-change theme, the purple zone (Cluster 3) shows the theme of evolution and the blue zone (Cluster 4) displays the theme of plants. Briefly, diversity and climate change are the main topics that appear mostly in research articles published in JPE during 2017–2021 (Fig. 2).

Conceptual structure map of keywords

A conceptual structure map of keywords was created based on multiple correspondences analysis (MCA). The conceptual structure map shows the relationship between one word and another by regional mapping, and each word is positioned according to the values of dimension 1 (Dim 1) and dimension 2 (Dim 2). MCA is used in bibliometric analysis, to develop a map between words with relatively similar values (Rahaman et al. 2022). The conceptual structure map can be used to identify clusters of documents that express common concepts (Aria and Cuccurullo 2017). A total of 50 words were grouped into two clusters on the map. The red zone (Cluster 1) represents the theme of climate change (how plants respond to environmental changes), and the blue zone (Cluster 2) indicates the theme of evolution (Fig. 3). In addition, the red zone includes a higher number and variety of words, suggesting that many research articles published in JPE during 2017–2021 are relevant to these themes shown in this region (Fig. 3). Moreover, the documents that make the most contribution associated with the two clusters are shown in Table 4, and five papers are detected for each of the cluster. The five articles with high contributions in Cluster 1 focused on plant communities (Ochoa-Hueso et al. 2021; Wei et al. 2019; Xu et al. 2020; Zhang et al. 2020a, 2020b), and the other five articles most representative of Cluster 2 focused on specific plant species (Kirschbaum et al. 2021; Liu et al. 2020; Smith et al. 2021; Yu and He 2021; Zeng et al. 2017).

Thematic analysis through bibliographic coupling

The thematic map of keywords is created with 250 words being grouped into 17 clusters. The sizes of the bubbles on the map depend on the number of publications in which the keywords appear (Rejeb et al. 2022). Themes with high density and high centrality, appearing in the first quadrant and namely motor themes, have strong internal and external ties, which are important and well developed. Themes with high density and low centrality, namely niche themes, have well-developed internal ties and marginally significant external ties, which appear in the second quadrant. Themes with low density and centrality in the third quadrant, namely emerging-or-declining themes, have both weak internal and external ties. Themes with low density and high centrality appearing in the fourth quadrant, namely basic themes, suggest well-developed external ties and unimportant internal ties. As shown in the map (Fig. 4), the themes including the keywords of rain-forest, leaf traits and leaf area are important and well developed in JPE during 2017–2021.

In conclusion, as a relatively young journal dedicated to all fields of plant ecology, JPE has established distinct features covering topics from microcosm to macrocosm, with diversity and climate change as the most frequently appearing key words. We encourage authors to submit their manuscripts from widely ranging topics of classical and contemporary ecology to JPE. We thank the authors, editors and readers for their consistent support to JPE, and we continue to aim building JPE as an internationally recognized journal with global impact.

Conflict of interest statement. The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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