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11 research sites and approximately 200 active and interested researcher members,
yet had only compiled an internal list of fewer than 100 ILTER research outputs
as of early 2014. TFRI in Taiwan has a history of over 50 years of intensive
production of numerous scholarly and other publications, each compiled in annual
reports, which has accumulated a vast bibliography that is incompletely digitized.
Collectively, these gaps highlight broader problems recognizing and sharing these
networks' outputs as bodies of ecological knowledge within the formal scientifi c
publication model. These gaps also highlight different priorities among national-
scale LTER networks with respect to how ecological knowledge is to be accessed.
For example, TFRI also maintains an extensive physical library of pre-war long-
term Japanese ecological research that is currently only accessible and searchable
in person.
Core databases for ecological and socio-ecological sciences were used to ana-
lyze the distribution of publication interests for each geographical zone.
12
In 11 of
the 14 bibliographic databases, the North Temperate region (Zone B) accounts for
over 50 % of all ILTER publications (Table
13.5
). The only three databases that
have more publications generated in other ILTER geographic regions are: BIOSIS
Reviews Reports and Meetings with over 50 % of the publications generated in
North Equator (Zone C); Arts & Humanities Citation Index and Current Contents
Arts & Humanities with over 99 % of the publications generated in South Temperate
(Zone E). Therefore, in the fi elds of the arts and humanities the Northern/Southern
Hemisphere ratio is 0.1/9.9.
The scarcity of publications in social sciences, engineering, and medicine data-
bases is noteworthy. Only 63 ILTER publications were found in the Social Sciences
Citation Index, and 60 in the Current Contents - Social Sciences & Behavioral
Sciences. Combined, these two databases account for less than 0.2 % of all ILTER
publications. Five large databases of natural sciences (
Science Citation Index
,
Social
Sciences Citation Index
,
BIOSIS Previews
,
Current Contents - Agriculture
,
Biology
& Environmental Sciences
, and
Zoological Record
) concentrate 90 % of all ILTER
publications.
13.3
Discussion and Implications for Earth Stewardship
The data presented here confi rm both the geographic and the conceptual biases in
ILTER research. A
Northern Hemispherism
is quantitatively demonstrated by a
Northern/Southern Hemispheres ratio greater than 9:1 in ILTER ISI publications,
and an even higher ratio for meta-data. Furthermore, within the Northern
Hemisphere, the production of knowledge is concentrated in the Temperate region
(Zone B), which includes the US, Western Europe, and North-East Asia.
12
For each ISI publication attributed to a zone, the ISI index in which that publication appears is
counted. Note that some publications appear in more than one ISI index.
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