Bibliometric study of fires in tropical rain forests

Abstract

Bibliometrics allows to analyze on behalf of literature searches the existing knowledge around a specific topic and identify tendencies in its development. Tropical forests are characterized naturally by a low regime of fires. However human activities have dramatically changed this phenomenon. Since tropical rain forests are a hot spot of world’s diversity, we conducted a bibliometric study of occurrence and effects of fires in tropical rain-forests. The aim of this work is to identify the main tendencies in biological literature about this subject, diagnose knowledge areas with a poor development and to define the geographic location of the performed studies and their methodological approach. This analysis will allow to identify the main gaps in the research of fires in tropical rain forests and contribute to direction the following research projects. We retrieved more than 2000 documents of indexed journals from the following bibliographic databases: Web of Science, Scopus, Science Direct, Biosis and Zoological abstracts. We selected the papers of words related with forest fires and tropical rain forests by an advanced search using logic and boolean operators. We considered for this study the fields: the document title, authors, adscription institution, publication year, journal name, Keywords and descriptors, country, knowledge area and abstract. With this information we designed and normalized the database. Then, we considered all the papers focused on the study of fires in tropical forests and we classified other works that not specifically worked on fires but mention it as an important element of their studies. We did this by looking for the words “fire” and “tropical forest” in the Keywords and abstracts. Then we analysed the documents by their geographic location and by the field of knowledge. We found an increasing interest in this topic in the scientific community since early 1950 to the present. The journals with more works in the theme were Forest ecology and management and Biotropica. We consider that this bibliometric review will help to the decisions making.