Climate change research (1991–2012): comparative scientometric study of Argentina, Brazil, China, India and Mexico

This paper attempts to highlight quantitatively the growth and development of climate change literature in terms of publication output as per Web of Science® (1991–2012, September).The focus of this analysis is to study the literature on climate change published from five developing countries namely Argentina, Brazil, China, India and Mexico. This paper is a comparative study on year wise, document type, most productive authors, subject wise, journal wise, institution wise, and language wise distributions. 7065 records have been retrieved for climate change for the studies countries. Country-wise climate change records and most prolific authors for the five countries have been identified. Authorship and collaboration trend was towards multi-authored papers. Institution-wise climate change records for these countries have also been generated. The topper here is Chinese Academy of Science, China (1843 records). We have grouped the listed publications from Web of Science® under “climate change” into six broad subjects among which “Geosciences (multidisciplinary)” has recorded maximum publications (22.4%) followed by “Environmental Sciences” (21.6%) while “Meteorology and atmospheric sciences” has recorded the least (9.3%). English language occupies the first place with 6882 out of 7065 records for the studied countries