Flaminio Silvia, Salomon Cavin Joëlle, Guex Guillaume, Moretti Marco
Université de Lausanne, Faculté des Géosciences et de l'Environnement, Institut de Géographie et Durabilité, Géopolis, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland.
Present Address: École Normale Supérieure de Lyon, 15 Parvis René Descartes, BP 7000, 69342 Cedex 07 Lyon, France.
Urban Ecosyst. 2024;27(6):2531-2542. doi: 10.1007/s11252-024-01603-4. Epub 2024 Sep 6.
Many authors have described 'urban ecology' as a subfield of ecology that emerged in the 1990s and has expanded exponentially. We propose to take a step further and analyse the expansion of the 'urban' in ecology with a novel quantitative approach, with the aim to better understand the relationship between ecology and the urban. Previous quantitative assessments of the urban in ecology have focused on short to medium time spans (5 to 40 years) and on research coined as 'urban ecology', and have rarely considered the content of publications (e.g., vocabulary and topics) using quantitative methods. In this paper, we conduct a bibliometric assessment and an in-depth quantitative textual data analysis of a corpus of 960 articles published from 1922 to 2018 in 10 leading English-language journals in ecology and conservation biology. We address the following questions: (1) When and how have urban environments been integrated into ecological research during the past century? (2) What urban research topics have been investigated in ecology during the same period? (3) How have these research topics changed through time? Our results show that the urban was never entirely absent from publications in ecology. The quantitative analyses highlight three turning points (1970s, 1990s and 2000s) in the relationship between ecology and the urban. Moreover, they help visualize the shift from particularly scattered publications at the beginning of the period to publications characterized by a more homogeneous vocabulary, reflecting the stabilization of a research field focused on the urban in ecology.
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11252-024-01603-4.
许多作者将“城市生态学”描述为生态学的一个子领域，它兴起于20世纪90年代，并呈指数级扩展。我们提议更进一步，用一种新颖的定量方法分析生态学中“城市”的扩展情况，目的是更好地理解生态学与城市之间的关系。此前对生态学中城市的定量评估主要集中在中短期时间跨度（5至40年）以及被称为“城市生态学”的研究上，很少使用定量方法考虑出版物的内容（如词汇和主题）。在本文中，我们对1922年至2018年在10种生态学和保护生物学领域的领先英文期刊上发表的960篇文章进行了文献计量评估和深入的定量文本数据分析。我们探讨以下问题：（1）在过去一个世纪中，城市环境是何时以及如何被纳入生态研究的？（2）同期在生态学中研究了哪些城市研究主题？（3）这些研究主题如何随时间变化？我们的结果表明，城市在生态学出版物中从未完全缺席。定量分析突出了生态学与城市之间关系的三个转折点（20世纪70年代、90年代和21世纪00年代）。此外，它们有助于直观呈现从该时期开始时特别分散的出版物到以更统一词汇为特征的出版物的转变，这反映了一个专注于生态学中城市的研究领域的稳定。
在线版本包含可在10.1007/s11252-024-01603-4获取的补充材料。
