Research on Climate Change and Fisheries: A Scientometric Analysis

Abstract

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 have already begun to adversely affect capture and culture fish production. The impactful scientific literature produced on climate change in relation to fisheries was tracked for period since 1990 till 2018. The open source freeware Publish or Perish (PoP) desktop application was used to retrieve the scientific articles, which were then subjected to 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 1,221 articles on climate change and fisheries were collated and then subjected to descriptive statistical analysis using MS-Excel and the data visualization software Power Bi. The results showed that output of scientific literature on ‘climate change and fisheries’ significantly increased after 2005. The five journals Journal of Coastal Research, Natural Hazards, Ocean and Coastal Management, Journal of Coastal Conservation and Sustainability Science were the top most preferred journals by authors for publishing ‘climate change in fisheries’ related studies. The 3 most impactful articles on ‘climate change in fisheries’ were authored by EH Allison, WWL Cheung and JM Roessig who were affiliated to institutions in USA and Canada. One third of the publications had single authors while 21% had two authors. In India, E. Vivekanandan (7; CMFRI), R.S. Mahendra (6; INCOIS) and A. S. Rajawat (SAC) are the ones with most publications. Climate science in India is still at nascent stage and increased funding and attention would be essential to evolve evidence based climate change adaptation strategies.