Research Area Mountain Regions, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria.
Centre for Mountain Studies, University of the Highlands and Islands, Perth, United Kingdom.
PLoS One. 2022 Aug 25;17(8):e0273421. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0273421. eCollection 2022.
Mountain areas provide essential resources for a significant proportion of the Earth's population. This study presents the development of mountain research between 1900 and 2019 based on peer-reviewed articles in English listed in Web of ScienceTM (WOS). We analyzed the number of publications over time, journals and scientific categories, frequent topics, and geographical distributions based on 40 mountain ranges and authors' countries as well as institutional contributions. From 1900-2019, 195k ±10% mountain research papers were published; over 50% from 2010-2019. While papers were published in more than 1000 different journals, indicating a wide range of disciplines engaged in mountain research, 94% of the papers were assigned to "Science & Technology", only <5% to "Social Sciences" and "Arts & Humanities". The most papers were written by researchers in the USA, followed by China. The number of papers per area or capita showed high variability across the investigated mountain ranges. Thus, geographically and disciplinarily more balanced research activities and better accessibility of knowledge about mountain regions are recommended.
山区为全球很大一部分人口提供了重要资源。本研究基于在 Web of ScienceTM (WOS) 中列出的英文同行评审文章，介绍了 1900 年至 2019 年间山区研究的发展情况。我们分析了随时间变化的出版物数量、期刊和科学类别、频繁出现的主题以及基于 40 个山脉和作者所在国家/地区和机构贡献的地理分布。1900 年至 2019 年期间发表了 19.5 万篇±10%的山区研究论文；2010 年至 2019 年期间发表了超过 50%的论文。虽然论文发表在 1000 多种不同的期刊上，表明许多学科都参与了山区研究，但其中 94%的论文被分配到了“科学与技术”类别，只有不到 5%的论文被分配到了“社会科学”和“艺术与人文”类别。发表论文数量最多的是美国的研究人员，其次是中国。在所调查的山区中，每个地区或人均发表的论文数量存在很大差异。因此，建议开展地域和学科更加均衡的研究活动，并提高山区知识的可及性。
