关键词: 生物多样性科学, 研究热点, 研究方向, 引用率, 挑战, 策划出版

Abstract

Aims: We have examined the major advancements in Biodiversity Science from 2013 to 2022 in order to celebrate its 30th anniversary and improve its capacity to serve the development of biodiversity science in China.
Progress: Over the past 10 years, a total of 56 special issues/features have been published to achieve a high quality and to advance the development in biodiversity research and conservation in China. With the development and needs of the subject, new categories have been established, including Editorial, Bioinventory, Data Paper, Conservation and Governance, and Biocultural Diversity. Among them, categories like Data Paper and Bioinventory are to encourage data sharing, Editorial to introduce hot topics, and Forum to encourage academic contending. Over this time, the number of research areas of the journal has increased from 61 to 78. Approximately 90% of the papers in the journal focus on biodiversity conservation, environmental sciences/ecology. The papers of botany, zoology and microbiology accounted for 41.79%, 47.48% and 4.61% of the total, respectively. The keywords of the published articles were grouped into nine subfields according to a bibliometric analysis. These subfields included genetic diversity, community structure, camera-trapping, the Convention on Biological Diversity, national parks, plant diversity, taxonomy, and geographical distribution. A significant amount of biodiversity talent has contributed to the journal, with 4,665 authors. The top 20 authors are mainly from associated institutes of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Environmental Sciences, Peking University, etc. There are 1,525 papers published in the journal during 2013 and 2022. Of these, 1,211 papers have been cited 13,507 times by journal papers (excluding thesis papers and conference papers) in total, with an average of more than 11 times of each article. They were also widely downloaded and the download capacity increased from 66.4 thousand times in 2012 to 238.5 thousand times in 2021. Five articles have been honored as “The Excellent Research Article Award” from China Association for Science and Technology (CAST) or “The 100 Most Influential Domestic Academic Papers” in China. The highly cited and downloaded papers mainly focus on national parks, camera-trapping, the red list, multifunctionality, and biological invasion. The impact factor and total cites of the journal have ranked highly in the field of biology. According to the World Journal Clout Index (WJCI) Report of Scientific and Technological Periodicals, the journal is the only Chinese journal among global conservation biology journals, ranked 23/48 in 2019 and 25/49 in 2020, respectively.
Prospects: Biodiversity Science has made a great contribution to the development of biodiversity science in China and become one of the most important journals in biodiversity conservation. Finally, we discuss how to continuously lead China’s biodiversity research and conservation in the future, challenges and countermeasures for creating a world first class journal, as well as how to improve science communication.

Key words: biodiversity science, research hotspots, research areas, citation rates, challenges, planning and publishing