Development of dendrochronology and its track in China since 1990 reflected by bibliometric analysis

Abstract

Dendrochronology is a discipline that uses tree rings to study the history and dynamics of the earth system, such as climate change, natural disasters, and human activities. This study aims to evaluate the development of dendrochronology and its track in China from 1990 to 2022 using a bibliometric analysis approach. We screened the Web of Science Core Collection for documents related to dendrochronology and analyzed them according to indicators related to production, cooperation, citation, and keywords. Our study revealed that the number of dendrochronological publications increased continuously, reaching more than 800 in 2021, with the USA and China being the top two countries. The cooperation network of dendrochronology was mainly centered between North America and Europe, with China having a moderate level of collaboration with other countries and regions like the USA and Canada. Comprehensive research has been conducted within diverse fields of dendrochronology in the world and in China, but dendrochronological research focusing on forestry and climatology represented a slightly higher proportion of research originating from China. The integration of dendrochronology with other disciplines and techniques, such as remote sensing, artificial intelligence, and modeling, may be hotspots in future research, as indicated by the increasing co-occurrence analysis of keywords in the most recent years. This study suggests that Chinese Dendrochronology still requires improved international collaboration, diversified research topics beyond climate reconstructions, and more emphasis on tree-ring methods to advance this discipline globally, despite of increasing rank of publications in the past decade.