Callaghan, MW, Minx, JC orcid.org/0000-0002-2862-0178 and Forster, PM orcid.org/0000-0002-6078-0171 (2020) A topography of climate change research. Nature Climate Change, 10 (2). pp. 118-123. ISSN 1758-678X
Abstract
The massive expansion of scientific literature on climate change1 poses challenges for global environmental assessments and our understanding of how these assessments work. Big data and machine learning can help us deal with large collections of scientific text, making the production of assessments more tractable, and giving us better insights about how past assessments have engaged with the literature. We use topic modelling to draw a topic map, or topography, of over 400,000 publications from the Web of Science on climate change. We update current knowledge on the IPCC, showing that compared with the baseline of the literature identified, the social sciences are in fact over-represented in recent assessment reports. Technical, solutions-relevant knowledge—especially in agriculture and engineering—is under-represented. We suggest a variety of other applications of such maps, and our findings have direct implications for addressing growing demands for more solution-oriented climate change assessments that are also more firmly rooted in the social sciences2,3. The perceived lack of social science knowledge in assessment reports does not necessarily imply an IPCC bias, but rather suggests a need for more social science research with a focus on technical topics on climate solutions.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited 2020. This is an author produced version of a paper published in Nature Climate Change. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) > Inst for Climate & Atmos Science (ICAS) (Leeds) The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Earth and Environment (Leeds) > Sustainability Research Institute (SRI) (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 30 Apr 2020 15:33 |
Last Modified: | 27 Jul 2020 00:40 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Nature Research |
Identification Number: | 10.1038/s41558-019-0684-5 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:159983 |