Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Network. Within the ILTER Network, national and supranational LTER networks
and local nodes participate in various collaborations and make their research data
and results available in formats for different potential re-users. In 2012, the ILTER
management committee initiated a review of the network's accumulated research
outputs, including publications, grey literature, data, meta-data, and other items. An
initial survey of the research network's member network websites estimated the
number of research output items produced by the network at 30,000-40,000, not
fully counting un-collated research outputs from several major national-scale net-
works including Mexico, Israel, and Taiwan. For this chapter, a new analysis was
conducted using titles and abstracts of approximately 30,000 research outputs in
order to better understand the global distribution of research themes and locations
of long-term ecological research. 1
13.2
Data, Methods, and Results
In this section we present detailed data collection methods, results, and brief analy-
sis of those data. The section is organized in four parts: (1) description of the data
source used for this study, (2) geographic distribution of ILTER research and publi-
cations or more broadly research outputs, (3) thematic distribution of ILTER
research, and (4) analysis of the venues where research outputs are published.
13.2.1
Methods and Data Source
In 2013, with the ILTER network we began to compile an accumulated bibliography
of all LTER research outputs generated by its member networks. Since ILTER lacks
a network-wide standard for materials eligible to be classifi ed as research outputs,
the kinds of references gathered varied among member networks and their sites.
Research outputs included data and meta-data descriptions of data, patents, schol-
arly articles, topic chapters, theses and dissertations, popular news articles, edited
volumes, commissioned reports, poster and presentation abstracts, meeting and
workshop proceedings, compendia, and other materials compiled by regional,
national, and local LTER networks and sites.
The timespans covered by member network bibliographies also differ. For exam-
ple, while the US LTER includes scholarly publications, dissertations, and theses
dating from the late 1970s shortly before the US LTER Network's formal initiation,
the Taiwan Forestry Research Network (TFRI, part of the national Taiwan Ecological
Research Network) includes in its bibliography those kinds of items plus patents
1 This dataset should be considered only as an initial attempt to collect a bibliography of ILTER
work, and is subject to revisions and omissions as detailed later.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search