Trends in Romanian Biodiversity Research: A Bibliometric Analysis

Studies on biodiversity topics have increased significantly during the past few decades. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the trends and growth of publications in Romania’s biodiversity research field using bibliometric techniques to assess the publications in this area. This type of study’s basis is the identification of the corpus of literature—that is, publications in a broad sense—in a certain field. Therefore, the term “biodiversity” was searched in keywords, title, and abstract in the Scopus database. The results retrieved a total number of 1.228 papers, published in the Scopus database, mentioning Romania that were processed using VOSviewer 1.6.19 software. This emerged in 5 thematic clusters revolving around: ecology, forests, sustainability, marine ecosystems, and genetics. The first article mentioning Romania to be included in the Scopus database was released in 1997. Top three words in term of occurrences were “biodiversity,” “Romania,” and “environmental protection.” Most of the papers were part of agriculture, environment, and Earth and planetary science subject areas. The findings also revealed a rising tendency in biodiversity research from 1997 to 2023, moving away from ecological, Black Sea, Danube Delta, and Carpathian Mountains matters and toward more emerging ones such as sustainability, species richness, and conservation management.