Impact of ICT in Environmental Sciences: A citation analysis 1990–2007

Detecting trends on the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the domain of environmental sciences is important to foresee new frontiers of modelling and software research. Here we analyze the impact of ICT in scientific papers published from 1990 to 2007 in all ISI journals and in those belonging to the Environmental Sciences category only. We thus determine some expanding, fluctuating or unexploited research directions. Quite unexpectedly, we find that the frequency of occurrence of many, yet not all, information technologies increased at significantly higher rates in the environmental studies than in the general sciences. We also contrast trends in the EMS journal to those of the entire domain and discuss differences in some details. Retrieving pertinent information for the comparison is certainly made difficult by some inconsistency in the use of keywords and the current lack of semantic oriented tools. Nevertheless, we find that this journal is leading the development on some research topics, like decision support systems or information systems.