Ecological word associations, animated

Posted by llester on January 26, 2016

Created by Ray Dybzinski (Loyola University Chicago, Institute of Environmental Sustainability) and Gord McNickle (Purdue University, Botany and Plant Pathology, @EvoEcoGames) and originally published on 8 January 2016.

Which ecological concepts have most occupied ecologists over the last fifty years? The video animates the frequency of words appearing in Ecology abstracts from 1964 (when the journal began publishing abstracts with research articles) to 2013. Word size is proportional to frequency. Proximity in abstracts is reflected in proximity and shared color in the word cluster. Dybzinski and McNickle used VOSviewer, a program for visualizing bibliographic networks, to map a moving window of words from 400 abstracts.

Learn more about their methods in the notes to the YouTube post.

Van Eck, N.J., & Waltman, L. (2010). Software survey: VOSviewer, a computer program for bibliometric mapping. Scientometrics, 84(2), 523-538. – See more at: http://www.vosviewer.com/publications/

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