Thirty years of climate change research: A fine-grained analysis of geographical specialization
Open accessAbstract
Bibliometric overviews of climate change research typically focus on the main topical trends and few countries with the largest share of the scientific production. These are important limitations: most of the world’s population live in countries that are heavily affected by climate change but have a relatively small scientific production, so that their topics of interest might be neglected. This contribution aims to address both limitations by investigating variations across countries in climate change research specialization. We employ a combination of state-of-the-art language modelling techniques to gain a fine-grained representation of the research topics on climate change, considering abstracts of 193,471 publications from 1990 to 2020. The analysis reveals the existence of five major country blocks, with distinct research specializations. Countries’ research specialization is driven by the specific challenges posed by climate change, such as extreme precipitation and floods and food, as well as the level of resources at disposal, so that research into the phenomenon of climate change and its global solutions is more important in affluent western countries. Less affluent countries – which host several billion people – develop distinct research focuses on local problems’ causes and mitigation strategies, but typically have limited resources to address these challenges. Hence, leading scientific countries should possibly contribute even more to addressing such issues.
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Western climatologists now pay attention to regions historically neglected.
“it shows in the attention that Western climatologists now pay to regions historically neglected (74).”
From How should the advancement of large language models affect the practice of science? (2025) · cites this paper as [74]
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- Authors
- Debernardi, C., Seeber, M., & Cattaneo, M.
- Affiliations
- University of Milan (IT)
- University of Agder (NO)
- University of Bergamo (IT)
- Corresponding author
- Debernardi, Carlo
- Venue
- Environmental Science & Policy
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2024-02
- Volume
- 152
- Pages
- 103663
- ISSN
- 1462-9011 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W4390382583
- Cited by
- 18
- References
- 44
- Citations by year
- 2026: 9 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 1
- FWCI
- 3.36
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Environmental Science & Policy (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- Aisberg (University of Bergamo) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- NORA - Norwegian Open Research Archives (submittedVersion, other-oa)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Statistics, Probability and Uncertainty › scientometrics and bibliometrics research
- Social Sciences › Economics, Econometrics and Finance › Economics and Econometrics › Climate Change Policy and Economics
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Climate Change Communication and Perception
- Keywords
- climate change research, research topics, research output by country, language modeling, climate change mitigation, food security, Global South, international research collaboration
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