Mapping ecological trends by keywords in the last 20 years

Background. An effective bibliometric analysis based on the Science Citation Index (SCI) published by the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI) was carried out to identify the trend of ecological research between 1992 and 2016. Methods. This study emphases on the high-frequency keywords and their relationships to reveal the hotspots and developing trends of ecological research fields . Results. The result shows that the hotpots of ecology has changed a lot during the last 25 years, but some topics occupied an important position in ecological research consistently. Especially, “Biodiversity” and “Climate change” have been obtained more and more attention, so their ranks also have been changed greatly. As well as, we find that the relationship of the most frequently used keywords become more closely and complicated compared to before. Another interesting and amazing result shows that the keywords related to anthropogenic increased sharply. Finally, keywords analysis was an effective approach for mapping ecological research. We guess that anthropogenic keywords may be a potential guide for future research.