Visualization of Soil Erosion Research in a Knowledge Map

Soil erosion research is a popular topic in soil science that appears in conjunction with several other topics like soil and/or water conservation, soil physics, chemistry and – biology and others. A request for the term “soil erosion” on CAB abstract CD, dated from January 1992 to January 2001, resulted in 15.531 articles. According to the publication year on average 1.639 articles are published per year. Objective of this paper is to analyze literature of soil erosion research with bibliometric methods and to achieve the following targets: 1) give an overview of the various sub-themes that arise in conjunction with soil erosion research; 2) find potential missing research areas; 3) show co-operations of different science areas and countries. To fulfill these objectives a visualization and analysis tool, called BibTechMon is used. This tool helps to get a quick overview of great amounts of literature, find conceptual interactions and show interactions of content. Results are various knowledge maps that show the content of soil erosion research and their interactions.