A citation-based map of concepts in invasion biology

Abstract

Invasion biology has been quickly expanding in the last decades so that it is now metaphorically flooded with publications, concepts, and hypotheses. Among experts, there is no clear consensus about the relationships between invasion concepts, and almost no one seems to have a good overview of the literature anymore. Similar observations can be made for other research fields. Science needs new navigation tools so that researchers within and outside of a research field as well as science journalists, students, teachers, practitioners, policy-makers, and others interested in the field can more easily understand its key ideas. Such navigation tools could, for example, be maps of the major concepts and hypotheses of a research field. Applying a bibliometric method, we created such maps for invasion biology. We analysed research papers of the last two decades citing at least two of 35 common invasion hypotheses. Co-citation analysis yields four distinct clusters of hypotheses. These clusters can describe the main directions in invasion biology and explain basic driving forces behind biological invasions. The method we outline here for invasion biology can be easily applied for other research fields.