A bibliometric analysis of publications in Ambio in the last four decades

Abstract Ambio is a leading journal in environmental science and policy, sustainable development, and human-environment interactions. The paper at hand aims to run a bibliometric analysis to inspect the main publications features of Ambio in Science Citation Index Expanded SCI-EXPANDED. For this scope, a bibliometric survey has been carried out to investigate the journal’s historic characteristics in the Web of Science (WoS) categories of environmental sciences and environmental engineering for Ambio from 1980 to 2019. These are the categories for which the journal has been indexed throughout the indexed time frame. The paper proposes technical and methodological innovations, including improvements in the methods and original characteristics analyzed. Documents published in Ambio were searched out from SCI-EXPANDED. Six publication indicators were applied to evaluate the publication performance of countries, institutes, and authors. Three citation indicators were used to compare publications. As a parameter, the journal impact factor contributor was applied to compare the most frequently cited publications. The journal impact factor contributing publications were also discussed. Results show that Sweden ranked top in six publication indicators and that the top three productive institutes were located in Sweden. A low percentage of productive authors emerged as a journal impact factor contributor. Similarly, a low relationship between the IF contributing publications and the highly cited publications was also found. Less than half of the top 100 highly cited publications in Ambio did not lie within the high impact in most the recent year of 2019. Three members of the advisory board in Ambio were the main productive authors. T.V. Callaghan contributed to most of the publications while papers published by J. Rockstrom as first and corresponding author contributed the most to the journal impact factor. An article authored by Steffen et al. (2007) scored the highest total citations in 2019.