Search

Spatial autocorrelation describes the interdependent relationship between the realizations or observations of a variable that is distributed across a geographical landscape, which may be divided into different units/areas according to natural or political boundaries. Researchers of Geographical Information Science (GIS) always consider spatial autocorrelation. However, spatial autocorrelation research covers a wide range of disciplines, not only GIS, but spatial econometrics, ecology, biology, etc. Since spatial autocorrelation relates to multiple disciplines, it is difficult gain a wide breadth of knowledge on all its applications, which is very important for beginners to start their research as well as for experienced scholars to consider new perspectives in their works. Scientometric analyses are conducted in this paper to achieve this end. Specifically, we employ scientometrc indicators and scientometric network mapping techniques to discover influential journals, countries, institutions, and research communities; key topics and papers; and research development and trends. The conclusions are: (1) journals categorized into ecological and biological domains constitute the majority of TOP journals;(2) northern American countries, European countries, Australia, Brazil, and China contribute the most to spatial autocorrelation-related research; (3) eleven research communities consisting of three geographical communities and eight communities of other domains were detected; (4) hot topics include spatial autocorrelation analysis for molecular data, biodiversity, spatial heterogeneity, and variability, and problems that have emerged in the rapid development of China; and (5) spatial statistics-based approaches and more intensive problem-oriented applications are, and still will be, the trend of spatial autocorrelation-related research. We also refine the results from a geographer's perspective at the end of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: An opinion currently shared by taxonomists and non taxonomists alike is that the work of inventorying biodiversity is unbalanced: firstly, in favour of countries in which taxonomy has been studied for a long time, and, secondly, in favour of vertebrates. In the current context of threats of species extinction, access for taxonomists to biological material and information becomes crucial if the scientific community really aims at a better knowledge of biological diversity before it is severely and irreversibly impoverished. We performed an analysis of 748 papers published in Zootaxa in 2006 and 2007, as well as 434 questionnaires sent to their authors to test these opinions. A generalization of these results to zoological taxonomy as a whole is discussed. Discussion: We found that the disequilibrium is not exactly what it usually considered to be. The USA, China and Brazil are currently the three leading countries in zoological taxonomy. Each of them presents, however, a different pattern. Taxonomists from Asia and South America are younger and mainly work in universities, not museums. A bias in favour of vertebrates still exists if we refer to the effort invested in each group to produce taxonomic data, but not to the number of papers. Finally, we insist on the idea that "describing a species" is very different from "knowing a species". Summary: The taxonomic involvement of a country, in terms of manpower and funding, appears to be a key factor in the development of fruitful taxonomic research. This message seems to have been understood by the countries that recently decided to increase considerably their taxonomic involvement. It still has to be received by those who did not. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]