Progress on entomopathogenic nematology research: A bibliometric study of the last three decades: 1980–2010

•Studies on EPN increased from 24 papers per year in the 1980s to 91 in the 2000s.•Biogeography studies have grown, revealing the presence of EPN in 36 countries.•Coauthorship networking has doubled from 9% in the 1980s to 20% in the 2000s.•In the 1980s, 72 journals published papers about EPN, and 210 did it in 2010.

Entomopathogenic nematodes have achieved a place in biological control programmes because of their effectiveness, speed of action, innocuousness to non-insect targets and simplicity of mass production. However many challenges derived due to the lack of knowledge in some critical steps from laboratories to their use in the fields, have to be resolved in order to improve their performance and to reduce the mass production costs. For those reasons, studies on entomopathogenic nematology have increased considerably in the last few decades. Also, there have been important changes in the ways that results are published; many of them relate to major transformations in scientific trends. Using bibliometric tools we characterize variations in number, types of journal, countries of origin, research topics and the number of participating countries, of 1923 papers (from 1980 to 2010) reported in several on-line editorial databases.

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