This dataset contains global dryland literature abstracts from over the last 75 years (8218 articles) to identify areas in arid ecology that are well studied and topics that are emerging.
Credit
We at TERN acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians throughout Australia, New Zealand and all nations. We honour their profound connections to land, water, biodiversity and culture and pay our respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
Purpose
Growth in the publication of scientific articles is occurring at an exponential rate, prompting a growing need to synthesize information in a timely manner to combat urgent environmental problems and guide future research.
Lineage
Meta-analysis: To review the literature on arid ecology we searched the ISI Web of Science with the following keywords: arid and ecology and terrestrial. We sorted articles by relevance and exported all articles with their abstracts from 1940 up to the end of 2015. Our search returned 9175 articles from this period. We removed articles with abstracts that did not share common words, resulting in 8218 articles and 49 913 shared words.