Global warming is a great concern for
the overall current and future health of the planet. The top 25 papers
in the Special Topic on Global Warming reflect the various research
topics in this field. Climate models, whether of sea-surface
temperatures, surface air temperature, or cloud parameterization, are
widely used methods for predicting future global temperature trends.
Concerns over the major causes of global warming—carbon dioxide
emissions, global nitrogen cycles, and change in land use and
vegetation cover—as well as concerns over potential consequences of
global warming—effects on coastal rainfall, stream-flow, sea ice,
and vegetation growth—are addressed. Storage of organic carbon in
soil and release of carbon dioxide from the soil are significant
factors that are hotly debated in global warming research. Past global
warming trends can be studied in the fossil record; one study shows
rapid global warming and oceanographic changes to be the cause of a
major deep-sea benthic extinction in the Paleocene era. Finally, as if
to demonstrate that the issues surrounding global warming are not
strictly limited to esoteric scientific interest, one of the papers in
this group addresses proposed policy changes to counteract global
warming’s deleterious effects.
Methodology
To construct this database,
papers were extracted based on title- and author-supplied keywords for
Global Warming. The keywords used were as follows: "global
warming."
The baseline time
span for this database is 1991-August 2001. The resulting database contained
2,823 papers; 4,624 authors; 77 countries; 804 journals; and
1,408
institutions.
Rankings
Once the database was in place,
it was used to generate the lists of top 25 papers, authors, journals,
institutions, and nations, covering a time span of 1991-August 2001.
The top 25 papers are ranked
according to total cites. Rankings for author, journal, institution,
and country are listed in three ways: according to total
cites, total papers, and total cites/paper.
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