GLOBAL RESEARCH IN CLIMATE CHANGE AND FISHERIES: A SCIENTOMETRIC ANALYSIS

Climate change has become one of the most contentious as well as pressing issue of our times. Changes and variations in rainfall pattern and temperature has already begun to adversely affect capture and culture fish production. The Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and its subsequent ratification by most countries has given a fillip to research studies on climate change and its impacts. Climate action is now one of the Sustainable Development Goals. An attempt has been made to track the impactful scientific literature produced on climate change in relation to fisheries since 1990 till 2018. The open source freeware Publish or Perish (PoP) desktop application was used to collect the scientific articles subjected to a scientometric study.

Several relevant word combinations of 'climate change', 'fisheries', 'aquaculture', 'fish', and 'aquatic environment' were used as search terms in PoP. After repeated screening, a total of 1221 unique articles were collected and then subjected to descriptive statistical analysis using MS-Excel and a data visualization software Power Bi. The results showed that output of scientific literature on climate change and fisheries significantly increased since 2005. The five journals Journal of Coastal Research, Natural Hazards, Ocean and Coastal Management, Journal of Coastal Conservation and Sustainability Science were found to be the top most preferred journals by authors for publishing climate change in fisheries related studies. The top 3 highly cited authors are EH Allison, WWL Cheung and JM Roessig who were affiliated to institutions in USA and Canada. The majority (381; 31%) of the publications are single authored while 21% (260) are double authored publications.  The author impact results shows that RJ Nicholls has the highest score (h index - 118) followed by ER Thieler (h index - 33). Similarly analysis done for Indian authors indicated that most number of articles were published by E. Vivekanandan (7; CMFRI), R.S. Mahendra (6; INCOIS) and A. S. Rajawat (SAC).