Changes in Authorship, Networks, and Research Topics in Ecosystem Services

I have a new paper, coauthored with Ida Kubiszewski, Bob Costanza, and Luke Concollato, which investigates the development of the field of ecosystem services over the last decade since the founding of the journal Ecosystem Services. This is an open access publication – my first in a so-called hybrid journal. We used the University College London read and publish agreement with Elsevier to publish the paper. ANU now has a similar agreement starting in 2023.

The paper updates Ida and Bob's paper published in 2012: "The authorship structure of ‘‘ecosystem services’’ as a transdisciplinary field of scholarship". In this paper, we update and expand that analysis and compare results with those we found in the previous analysis. We also analyse the influence that the journal Ecosystem Services has had on the field over its first 10 years. We look at which articles have had the most influence on the field (as measured by the number of citations in Ecosystem Services) and on the broader scientific literature (as measured by total citations). We also look at how authorship networks, topics, and the types of journals publishing on the topic have changed. 

Not surprisingly, there has been significant growth in the number of authors (12,795 to 91,051) and number of articles published (4,948 to 33,973) on ecosystem services since 2012. Authorship networks have also expanded significantly, and the patterns of co-authorship have evolved in interesting ways. The most prolific authors are no longer in as tight clusters as they were 10 years ago.

The network chart shows the coauthorship relations among the 163 most prolific authors – those authors who have published more than 30 articles in the field. Colors indicate continent: Yellow = North America, red = South America, blue = Europe, purple – Africa, green = Asia, and orange = Oceania. The greatest number of authors is in Europe and they almost all collaborate with other top authors. Only in Asia and to a lesser degree North America are there top authors who do not collaborate with other top authors.

Costanza et al. (1997) is the most influential article in terms of citations in the journal Ecosystem Services and "Global estimates of the value of ecosystems andtheir services in monetary units" by de Groot et al. (2012) is now the most cited article published in Ecosystem Services.

Ecosystem Services is now the most prolific publisher of articles on ecosystem services among all the journals that have published in the area. There are nine journals that are both on the list of the 20 journals cited most often in Ecosystem Services and on the list of the top 20 journals cited by articles published in Ecosystem Services: Ecosystem Services, Ecological Economics, Ecological Indicators, Science of the Total Environment, Land Use Policy, Journal of Environmental Management, PLoS One, Ecology and Society, and Environmental Science & Policy.

Influential Publications in Ecological Economics Revisited to be Published in... Ecological Economics

Our paper on the changes over the last decade in patterns of influence in ecological economics has been accepted for publication. Not very surprisingly the journal where it will be published is Ecological Economics. Elsevier have already sent me an e-mail saying that I should expect the proofs on 21 January! That is fast.

Influential Publications in Ecological Economics Revisited

Back in 2004 I published with Bob Costanza, Chunbo Ma, Brendan Fisher, and Lining He a paper that looked at the most influential publications on the field of ecological economics. Then, about this time last year Gaël Plumecocq contacted me about participating in a session he was organizing at the European Society of Ecological Economics meeting in Leeds on "ecological economics understood as an epistemic community". I had the idea of revisiting our 2004 paper a decade later and seeing how the field had changed in the meantime. Eventually, Gaël also came on board our author team, contributing a textual analysis of the key themes in the influential papers. Gaël gave a presentation on the paper at ESEE and now we finally have a working paper version of our new paper on the web. The full author team includes: Bob Costanza, Rich Howarth, Ida Kubiszewski, Shuang Liu, Chunbo Ma, Gaël, and myself.

We downloaded from the Web of Science (WoS) information on all the papers published in Ecological Economics from 2004 to 2014 including the number of citations each received and the full reference list from all 2960 articles. We define outwardly influential papers as the 10% of articles published in the journal in each year from 2004 to 2014 that received the most citations in the Web of Science. The inwardly influential publications are all publications that received more than 15 citations in the journal in the period 2004-2014. For each of these publications we collected the total number of citations in the Web of Science, Google Scholar, and Ecological Economics. The inward influence data needed a lot of cleaning up, which was mainly done by Chunbo and Ida with my help.

Shuang produced these graphs of inward and outward influence using Tableau:

For inward influence, there are many publications at the bottom right that have been relatively much more influential across science as a whole than they have been in ecological economics. Publications towards the left have been mostly influential in ecological economics alone. By contrast, there is a stronger correlation between citations received in the journal and more broadly for the outwardly influential articles. One outlier is the Pimentel et al. paper on the costs of invasive species that is the most cited article (by WoS cites) ever published in ecological economics.

The theme analysis found, as we expected, that the most influential topic was ecosystem services and payments for ecosystem services, which received 25% of the citations of the influential publications. By contrast, sustainable development and foundations of ecological economics were the most influential topics prior to 2004.

We also followed up on my 2006 paper with Chunbo Ma by looking at the journals, which cite Ecological Economics the most and which are cited by Ecological Economics the most:

 

There have been quite dramatic changes in these lists with more than half the journals being new entrants. In general there has been an increase in citation links to interdisciplinary environmental science and environmental studies journals and a reduction in links to mainstream economics journals including environmental economics journals. No general interest economics journals are now on the top 20 inward and outward lists.

We think that these trends reflect a maturation of ecological economics as a transdisciplinary field.

New Dimensions in Ecological Economics: Elgar E-Book

Our edited book New Dimensions in Ecological Economics: Integrated Approaches to People and Nature is now available as an E-Book from Edward Elgar. This book was based on the 2000 ISEE international conference in Canberra that Mike Young and I organized.

13 Years On Our Book Becomes an E-Book!

The book was published in 2001 but the conference it is based on was held in Boston in 1996! Anyway, the e-book is now online and the introductory chapter is open access.

Natural Resources and Economic Growth

Carlo Carraro, Marianne Fay, and Marzio Galeotti call for mainstream macroeconomics textbooks to talk about the role of natural resources in economic growth and development. This is something that ecological economists have been calling for 25 years plus. But it is good to see more people getting on board. I wonder though how much consensus there is on what we should teach students about this.

EROI Goes Mainstream

Back in 1990-91 when I started my PhD I was introduced to esoteric ideas like Energy Return on Investment and Peak Oil in classes given by Cutler Cleveland and Robert Kaufmann. Nowadays, these ideas are showing up in humorous videos on YouTube.

Entropy Explained

Entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics has always been a very confusing topic in ecological economics. Tom Murphy explains the difference between information entropy and thermodynamic entropy and what the second law really implies for living and economic systems. Apparently, von Neumann is to blame for all the confusion. He also supposedly told Nash that his Nash equilibrium result was "trivial", though it won Nash the Nobel Prize in economics (with a 45 year delay...).

ANZSEE Conference 2013

The 2013 ANZSEE Conference will take place in November at the Crawford School. All abstracts are due by 26th July. There will both be traditional papers and "working groups" that sound something like panel discussions. The last ANZSEE conference went to was the ANZSEE Conference in Darwin in 2009, which I thought was a great conference. The last ANZSEE or ISEE conference in Canberra was the 2000 ISEE Conference.

Robert Gordon on Economic Growth

A recent working paper by Robert Gordon - Is U.S. Economic Growth Over? has been much discussed. Gordon argues that US growth has already slowed down and will slow further for various reasons including action on climate change. He describes the idea that rapid economic growth might be a once off event in human history as "audacious" (p2). But I think this is a commonplace idea in ecological economics. And slowing growth in the frontier countries is a common assumption in building business as usual scenarios for assessing climate change policies. On the other hand, it runs counter to the usual endogenous growth theory assumption that the rate of innovation continues to accelerate with growing world population. From this perspective it is a fairly radical idea that if true requires change to some theories.

Bob Costanza Appointed to Chair in Public Policy at Crawford School

I previously blogged about Bob Costanza and Ida Kubiszewski visiting the Crawford School from August to the end of this year. Now I'm happy to let you know that they're staying. Bob was appointed to one of the Vice-Chancellor's chairs of Public Policy at Crawford. The first such appointee was Warwick McKibbin. Ida will be a senior lecturer in Crawford.

Visitors to Crawford

We are very happy to welcome Professor Robert Costanza and Dr Ida Kubiszewski as Visiting Fellows to the Crawford School.


Professor Robert Costanza was Distinguished University Professor of Sustainability, in the Institute for Sustainable Solutions at Portland State University. Before moving to PSU in late 2010, he was the Gund Professor of Ecological Economics and founding director of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont. Before Vermont, he was on the faculty at Maryland and LSU, a visiting scientist at the Beijer Institute in Sweden, and at the Illinois Natural History Survey. Bob is also currently a Senior Fellow at the National Council on Science and the Environment, Washington, DC, and a Senior Fellow at the Stockholm Resilience Center, Stockholm, Sweden, and an Affiliate Fellow at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont. Bob is co-founder and past-president of the International Society for Ecological Economics, and was chief editor of the society's journal, Ecological Economics from its inception in 1989 until 2002. He is founding co-editor (with Karin Limburg and Ida Kubiszewski) of Reviews in Ecological Economics. He currently serves on the editorial board of ten other international academic journals. He is also founding editor in chief of Solutions (www.thesolutionsjournal.org ) a unique hybrid academic/popular journal. Bob is the author or co-author of over 500 scientific papers and 23 books. His work has been cited in more than 11,000 scientific articles and he has been named as one of ISI’s Highly Cited Researchers since 2004.



Dr Ida Kubiszewski was a Research Assistant Professor and Fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Solutions, at Portland State University. She is also the Managing Editor of a magazine/journal hybrid called Solutions, launched January 2010. Solutions is an outlet for discussions focusing on solutions to the complex problems we are now facing in the context of whole systems design for a sustainable and desirable future. She is also the co-editor (with Karin Limburg and Robert Costanza) of Reviews in Ecological Economics, published annually by Springer, providing in-depth reviews of the most timely and important issues in the field of Ecological Economics. Ida is also a co-founder and former-Managing Editor of the Encyclopedia of Earth, an electronic reference about the Earth, its natural environments, and their interaction with society. She is a Junior Fellow at the National Council for Science and the Environment and sits on the steering committees or advisory boards of various organizations including the Ecosystem Service Partnership, Environmental Information Coalition, and the U.S. Society for Ecological Economics.

2011 Journal Citation Report Released

Every June, Thomson Reuters releases the Journal Citation Reports that present citation data and most importantly impact factors for all the journals covered by the Web of Science. My immediate impression of this year's report is that impact factors are fairly stable in this iteration compared to last year and that the number of journals included in economics has stopped increasing. Over the last few years Thomson Reuters has doubled the number of journals covered in economics from around 160 to 320. This has doubled most impact factors as there are twice as many venues to be cited in as previously. However, in 2011 Ecological Economics has a two year impact factor of 2.713 and in 2010 its IF was 2.754. The total number of economics journals seems relatively stable:



The expansion in the number of social science journals covered clearly is a result of competition by Scopus, which started in 2004 boasting a much wider coverage of the social sciences than the Web of Science published by Thomson-Reuters.

For a primer on bibliometric indicators click here.

Public Lecture by Bob Costanza at the Crawford School

Bob Costanza is visiting the Crawford School at ANU and giving a public lecture:

‘Ecosystem services come of age: Linking science, policy, and participation for sustainable human well-­being’
Tuesday 15 May 2012
5:00pm - 6:00pm
Weston Theatre, JG Crawford Building 132, Lennox Crossing, ANU

More details and RSVP here.

Costanza is University Professor of Sustainability in the Institute for Sustainable Solutions at Portland State University. He is also editor-in-chief and co-founder of the new journal Solutions. Bob was the founding president of the International Society for Ecological Economics and founding editor of Ecological Economics. He has a very impressive record of high impact publications.

On a personal note, my PhD advisor, Cutler Cleveland studied for his masters degree with Bob at Louisiana State University. Bob was also my wife, Shuang's PhD adviser. And I coauthored a paper with Bob in 2004. I often think that ecological economists should have "Costanza numbers" like the well-known Erdös numbers :)

Ecological Economics Best Paper Prize

Elsevier has offered a prize for a Best Paper Award for Ecological Economics, which we would like to announce or present to the winner at the ISEE Conference in June. The members of the editorial board are supposed to each nominate a paper and then the editor and associate editors will pick the best.

The criteria are to find the "outstanding paper published in Ecological Economics in 2010-2011 that uniquely advances research and praxis in ecological economics."

With more than 500 papers published I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed in coming up with a suggestion. So I was wondering if any of you have any ideas.

New Citation Analysis of Environmental and Ecological Economics

A new citation analysis of environmental and ecological economics has just been published in Ecological Economics. The authors are Andreas Hoepner, Benjamin Kant, Bert Scholtens, and Pei-Shan Yu. It follows up on our papers on influential articles in the field (Costanza et al., 2004; Ma and Stern, 2006) by analyzing articles from 2000-2009. The main characteristics of their research design are:

1. They only look at citations to articles published between 2000 and 2009 in a group of 14 environmental and resource economics journals including Ecological Economics.

2. The main indicator is citations per annum which gives recently published papers much more weight than in most traditional rankings.

3. They distribute citations to authors and institutions on a fractional basis - so each author of our 2004 paper would only get 20% of the citations.

The results are interesting but different to what you might expect. Costanza ends up being ranked 61st in the field as all the above features count against him. C. C. Lee ends up in the 1st position in the ranking. Papers and authors associated with ecosystem services and payments for them are highly ranked which does make sense.

We did not publish a ranking of authors as part of our 2004 and 2006 papers but we did calculate them. So here are the rankings based on number of citations between 1994 and 2003 in articles published in Ecological Economics:



The full pdf is here. A peculiarity of this ranking is that all citations are assigned to the first author due to the limitations of the Web of Science database at the time. Despite this, it seems fairly plausible to me.

For JEEM, we came up with the following ranking:



Full list here.

The Rise and Fall of Ecological Economics

Mark Sagoff has written an article with this title in the Breakthrough Journal. This is a new publication of the Breakthrough Institute which is a contrarian but self-described "progressive" think tank that has a large focus on environmental issues.

In the article Sagoff mainly claims that ecological economics started promisingly but got sidetracked by adopting environmental valuation and cost-benefit analysis and is now ignored by everyone. There are lots of other discussions about the history of ecology etc. along the way. Sagoff has been a consistent opponent of cost-benefit analysis. I think the essay is very polemical and overemphasizes some trends while ignoring others. Some ecological economists have adopted mainstream approaches to non-market valuation of the environment for largely pragmatic reasons as described. But this is by no means all or even the majority of ecological economists, especially in Europe. Ecological Economics does publish quite a few papers on valuation but also on all kinds of other topics and approaches. We have always taken a very open-minded and eclectic approach. There has been convergence between ecological and mainstream environmental economics over time, but it hasn't been a one way street.

Personally, I have always been opposed to non-market environmental valuation for both practical and philosophical reasons. I don't believe that it is possible to come up with at all credible prices through these approaches and especially not sustainability-relevant prices. And I don't think CBA should be used for making large societal decisions as they are more about distribution than efficiency. I am all for efficiency though in implementing goals once society has decided on them.

Shuang's Blog Has a New Name

It's still at the same URL but has a new title: "Collective decision-making under uncertainty" instead of "Bioinvasion and ecoservices", which reflects the evolution of her research interests over the last 4 years since coming to CSIRO.

New Journal: Ecosystem Services

A new journal from Elsevier with an editorial board with a lot of well-known names from ecological economics. From the homepage:

Ecosystem Services, associated with Ecosystem Services Partnership (ESP), is an international, interdisciplinary journal that deals with the science, policy and practice of Ecosystem Services in the following disciplines: ecology and economics, institutions, planning and decision making, economic sectors such as agriculture, forestry and outdoor recreation, and all types of ecosystems.

The aims of the journal are:
(1) to improve our understanding of the dynamics, benefits and social and economic values of ecosystem services,
(2) to provide insight in the consequences of policies and management for ecosystem services with special attention to sustainability issues,
(3) to create a scientific interface to policymakers in the field of ecosystem services assessment and practice, and
(4) to integrate the fragmented knowledge about ecosystem services, synergies and trade-offs, currently found in a wide field of specialist disciplines and journals.

ISEE 2012 Call for Papers

Abstracts are due by 15th November. At this point, I'm not planning on attending. The last ISEE meeting I went to was in Montreal in 2004. But that was far to travel. I have enough international travel to do anyway and it is during time when I'll possibly be needing to be teaching. But if you haven't been to one, it could be worth it. The first one I went to was Stockholm in 1992, the second conference I went to and I was on the organizing committee in Boston in 1996 and in Canberra 2000 when I was the main organizer. I also went to Sousse, Tunisia in 2002.