Bibliometric Test of the MR ‘Bandwagon’

Abstract

This chapter presents a bibliometric analysis which is designed to test the claims made in Chap. 2 of a marine reserve (MR) ‘bandwagon’. This bibliometric analysis of the peer-reviewed MR literature made use of a social network analysis to identify key scientists and a citation analysis to identify key papers. The social network analysis was performed to find out which scientists were most connected with their peers through research collaboration. The citation analysis was designed to discover which MR papers have been most cited, in which journals they have been most published, and the extent to which there was crossover in the most highly cited papers between different research fields. The findings of the bibliometric analysis are that MR studies dominated the marine management literature, that 90 % of MR researchers are marine ecologists, that MR publications have been highly influential among marine scientists, and that MR research has likely attracted more funding than any other subject area in the applied marine sciences. This is an emphatic confirmation of the MR ‘bandwagon’.