Barot Sébastien, Blouin Manuel, Fontaine Sébastien, Jouquet Pascal, Lata Jean-Christophe, Mathieu Jérôme
UMR 137, Institut de Recherche pour le Développement (IRD), Bondy, France.
PLoS One. 2007 Nov 28;2(11):e1248. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0001248.
Soil ecology has produced a huge corpus of results on relations between soil organisms, ecosystem processes controlled by these organisms and links between belowground and aboveground processes. However, some soil scientists think that soil ecology is short of modelling and evolutionary approaches and has developed too independently from general ecology. We have tested quantitatively these hypotheses through a bibliographic study (about 23000 articles) comparing soil ecology journals, generalist ecology journals, evolutionary ecology journals and theoretical ecology journals.
We have shown that soil ecology is not well represented in generalist ecology journals and that soil ecologists poorly use modelling and evolutionary approaches. Moreover, the articles published by a typical soil ecology journal (Soil Biology and Biochemistry) are cited by and cite low percentages of articles published in generalist ecology journals, evolutionary ecology journals and theoretical ecology journals.
This confirms our hypotheses and suggests that soil ecology would benefit from an effort towards modelling and evolutionary approaches. This effort should promote the building of a general conceptual framework for soil ecology and bridges between soil ecology and general ecology. We give some historical reasons for the parsimonious use of modelling and evolutionary approaches by soil ecologists. We finally suggest that a publication system that classifies journals according to their Impact Factors and their level of generality is probably inadequate to integrate "particularity" (empirical observations) and "generality" (general theories), which is the goal of all natural sciences. Such a system might also be particularly detrimental to the development of a science such as ecology that is intrinsically multidisciplinary.
土壤生态学已经产生了大量关于土壤生物之间的关系、由这些生物控制的生态系统过程以及地下与地上过程之间联系的研究成果。然而，一些土壤科学家认为土壤生态学缺乏建模和进化方法，并且发展过于独立于普通生态学。我们通过一项文献研究（约23000篇文章）对土壤生态学期刊、综合生态学期刊、进化生态学期刊和理论生态学期刊进行比较，对这些假设进行了定量测试。
我们发现综合生态学期刊中土壤生态学的代表性不足，并且土壤生态学家对建模和进化方法的运用较少。此外，一份典型的土壤生态学期刊（《土壤生物学与生物化学》）发表的文章被综合生态学期刊、进化生态学期刊和理论生态学期刊发表的文章引用的比例较低，同时它引用这些期刊文章的比例也低。
这证实了我们的假设，并表明土壤生态学将受益于在建模和进化方法方面的努力。这种努力应促进构建土壤生态学的一般概念框架，以及在土壤生态学和普通生态学之间架起桥梁。我们给出了土壤生态学家对建模和进化方法使用较少的一些历史原因。我们最后指出，一个根据期刊影响因子及其通用性水平对期刊进行分类的出版系统，可能不足以整合“特殊性”（实证观察）和“通用性”（一般理论），而这是所有自然科学的目标。这样一个系统也可能对生态学这样本质上是多学科的科学的发展特别不利。
