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Resilience thinking: a bibliometric analysis of socio-ecological research
Li Xu and Dora Marinova
Curtin University Sustainability Policy (CUSP) Institute, Curtin University of Technology,
Perth, Western Australia
Email: lixucusp@gmail.com
Email: D.Marinova@curtin.edu.au
Introduction
The concept of resilience was firstly introduced by Holling in 1973 in an ecological context. He defined
resilience as: “A measure of the persistence of systems and of their ability to absorb change and disturbance and
still maintain the same relationships between populations or state variables…and it is concerned with
persistence or probabilities of extinction” (Holling, 1973, p. 14). In recent decades, resilience thinking has been
increasingly permeating sustainability debates in the context of social-ecological systems and the impact human
activities have on the planet’s physical environment. According to the Resilience Alliance, an interdisciplinary
network of scientists and practitioners established in 1999, resilience in social-ecological systems has three
defining characteristics: “the amount of change the system can undergo and still retain the same controls on
function and structure, the degree to which the system is capable of self-organisation, and the ability to build
and increase the capacity for learning and adaptation” (Resilience Alliance, 2002, n.p.). Resilience has also been
identified as one of the most influential concepts in sustainability research (Quental and Lourenço, 2012).
The prevailing perspectives on sustainability and natural resources management focus on how to
achieve stability, manage effectively and control change and economic growth (Adger et al., 2005; Folke, 2003
and 2006). However, this is not enough in a constantly changing globe and further research needs to allow for
multidisciplinarity (McMichael et al., 2003), interdisciplinarity (Bjurström and Polk, 2011) and
transdisciplinarity (Marinova and McGrath, 2005; Buns and Weaver, 2008) in order to better understand any
occurring transformations. Jappe (2006) describes this as mutual task dependence of all scientific fields.
Resilience as a new concept and way to look at the world was introduced in order to analyse how complex
systems are adapting to climate change and human disturbance. Many argue that resilience thinking for social-
ecological systems will be the optimal way to enhance the likelihood of sustainability in the uncertain future
(Walker et al., 2004; Adger et al., 2005; Folke, 2006).
The main purpose of this study is to identify trends in resilience research using a bibliometric analysis.
In particular, we identify the prevailing patterns of influence resilience research has in different contexts and the
geographical distribution of this research output. The paper consists of four sections as follows. Section 2
describes the bibliometric analysis (procedures) used in the study, including data source, applied keywords,
types of publications and limitations to data collection. Statistical analysis, ranking and distribution mapping of
the resilience research outcomes are presented in section 3. The last section contains concluding remarks about
the outcomes from this analysis.
Methodology and data
The study is based entirely on bibliographic desk-based research conducted in July-August 2012. It uses data
sources available to almost all academic institutions in western countries. As the aim is to analyse the impact
and importance of resilience research, we opted to investigate only publications that have been cited (instead of
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providing a general description of all resilience publications irrespective as to how valuable they have been to
other researchers). The main imperative that triggered this choice are the concerns of the scientific community
associated with climate change and the need to see fast considerable real changes in order to address the
deteriorating state of the planet. Despite the many questions and valid points raised around the use of citation
analysis (MacRoberts and MacRoberts, 1996), the fact remains that cited research is a valid indicator for the
influence of any work, at least on other researchers (Cole and Cole, 1972). Small’s (2004) study identifies
interest, novelty, utility and significance – all linked to research importance, as interrelated reasons stated by
academic authors for their research to be cited.
Analysing only numbers of cited publications, rather than the actual number of cites they have attracted
on the other hand, helps deal with problems associated with citation counts, such as biased over-citing, citing of
a well-recognised body of literature, socio-psychologically motivated reasons to increase cites, different citation
rates across disciplines as well as institutional and self-citations. More information about the methodology of the
study is presented below.
Data sources
The data in this study was retrieved from three widely used databases, namely:
(1) Google Scholar – a freely available web-based tool in operation since 2006 that allows search for
scholarly literature across disciplines and sources, including theses, books, papers and abstracts
(Google Scholar, 2012, n.p.);
(2) Web of Science – an academic citation indexing and search service of Thompson Reuters’ Web of
Knowledge (formerly operated by the Institute for Scientific Information, ISI) launched in 2002 which
claims to be “today's premier research platform for information in the sciences, social sciences, arts,
and humanities” (Thompson Reuters, 2012, n.p.) and covers journals, conference papers, websites,
patents and chemical structures; and
(3) Scopus – launched by SciVerse in 2004 to facilitate library searches around the world with an easy
access to “the world’s largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed literature” (Elsevier, 2012,
n.p.) covering journals, trade publications, book series and conference papers.
The period of examination spans from 1973 to 2011, i.e. from the year when resilience was first introduced to
the most recent year. The data from these different databases is analysed but also compared between the three
sources with the aim to identify the general trends in resilience research. According to Aguillo (2012), Google
Scholar provides the largest coverage of sources. Its free-of-charge availability also makes it accessible to all
researchers, including outside the western academic system. These are the reasons why we opted to use Google
Scholar to further analyse the geographical spatial distribution of research outputs related to resilience.
Keywords used
In order to identify resilience related publications, we applied keyword searches within the titles, keywords and
abstracts of the various research outputs. The keywords used to search for such publications are mainly
associated with the word “resilience” and also include the following combinations “ecological resilience”,
“economic resilience”, “social resilience”, “resilience & sustainability”, “resilience & sustainable development”,
“resilience & social-ecological systems”, “social-ecological resilience”, “resilience & environment”, “resilience
& natural resources” and “resilience & assessment”. The targeted coverage was intended to provide insights not
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only about ecological resilience but also how the concept relates to sustainability and the integration of its social,
economic and environmental tenants.
References selected
The publications selected in our study are those cited journal articles, books, conference papers, working papers,
comments, theses and reports that list the word “resilience” in the title or as their keyword. In addition, if
“resilience” does not appear in any of the above, we included the publication in the dataset only if “resilience”
appears at least three times in the abstract. In other words, we have applied a very strict and generally limiting
way of categorising a publication’s belonging to our sample in order to accurately reflect the penetration of
resilience thinking in academic research. A less restrictive approach would probably have expanded the size of
the sample but would have raised questions as to how reliable any claims are.
Limitation of the data selection
It should be acknowledged that some limitations exist in the dataset used for this analysis. The publications
counted in the study include only those containing “resilience” either in their title, keywords or abstract whilst
publications based on possible synonyms, such as stability, adaptability, resistance, reliability and robustness, or
antonyms, such as vulnerability, susceptibility and defencelessness, are excluded. Also, the selected publications
include only documents in English which have been cited by other publications in English, and non-English
publications were not considered.
Thus the publications counted in this paper do not include all publications in resilience research. The
existing publications and research outcomes no doubt overweigh what we could find and access in this study.
There are certainly other scholarly papers that are making their contribution to this area, particularly in
languages such as Chinese, German, Spanish and French and this study is not trying to undermine the work
done by these researchers. Any limitations should be seen as a deficiency in the current web-based data search
engines rather than a deliberative decision by the authors. It will be interesting to compare the results from this
study with any further work as the capacity of search tools expands.
Results and discussion
The analysis in this section is organised around five research directions. The first one is general statistics which
describe the total number of cited publications on resilience and the particular context that has been the focus of
this resilience research. In addition, we compare the data obtained from Google Scholar, Scopus and the Web of
Science to illustrate the total trend in resilience thinking. Journal output and paper citation analyses of resilience
publications represent the second research direction. The third direction engages with the spatial geographical
distribution of the studies and particular case studies represented in the cited resilience publications. This is
followed by an analysis of the national affiliations of the publications’ authors and how different countries
around the world are represented in resilience research. The last aspect shows the leading research institutes in
the top 15 productive countries in the area of resilience.
General statistics
Resilience thinking has come a long way since its 1973 inception with the number of publications steadily on
the increase. The annual numbers of cited publications for the 1973–2011 period are shown on Figure 1. In total
919, 939 and 942 cited publications were found through the respective databases of Google Scholar, Scopus and
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Web of Science. It is interesting to observe that contrary to popular believes and earlier studies (e.g. Yang and
Meho, 2006), the largest amount of resilience publications are captured by the Web of Science which is the most
academically oriented database. In other words, there are many highly specialised scholarly publications that
target the scientific community and are not necessarily captured by the more popular Google Scholar and
Scopus search engines. On the other hand, the discrepancy between the three databases is relatively low, at
around 2%. Most importantly, the overall trend and fluctuations appear to be very similar, irrespective as to
which database is used. Hence, resilience research is very well represented by any of the three databases which
does not seem to be the case in other research areas, such as for example medicine Falagas et al. (2007) or social
sciences (Harzing, 2012).
Fig. 1 Annual numbers of cited research publications in Web of Science and resilience publications in Scopus,
Google Scholar and Web of Science, 1973–2011
In addition to resilience publications (right vertical axis), Figure 1 also shows the total number of cited
publications for all research fields (left vertical axis) for the 1973–2011 period. Against the overall consistently
increasing trend in total research outputs, resilience publications show a significant surge in relatively recent
years. This indicates that resilience is becoming a robust research field.
The number of cited resilience publications reached a peak in 2010; however they seem to constantly
fluctuate around a strong upwards trend and 2011 may just be one of these fluctuations, rather than a significant
drop. Between 1973 and 1999, there was a stable increase in resilience publications, but this was followed by a
very strong increase between 1999 and 2005 and an even further sharp increase since 2005. The study by
Janssen et al. (2006, p. 10) already provided reliable evidence that the area of resilience has experienced “a
major and still continuing increase in the number of published papers” (Janssen et al., 2006: 10). It is also
encouraging to see the increasing trends in the uptake of these research findings as expressed in citations. The
dramatic increase since 1999 in the number of cited publications has partly benefitted from the establishment of
the outstanding global Resilience Alliance network with its academic journal Ecology and Society (Janssen et al.,
2006) as well as from the increased interest in global environmental changes during 1990s. Activities on the
global political arena since 2005, such as the release of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Reports in 2005,
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the Stern Review in 2006, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s 4th Assessment Report in
2007, as well as the continuing regular international climate change meetings and negotiations, all stimulated
researcher interest in resilience.
Figure 2 breaks down the Google Scholar data to provide a more detailed overview of the specific areas
of interest of resilience research as it relates to ecological (Eco-R), economic (Econ-R) and social systems (Soci-
R) as well as to an integrated sustainability (Sust-R) approach. This original categorisation was done arbitrarily
based on the research topics of the papers. Although we are not aware of any other similar classification, almost
all resilience publications explicitly state their area of interest which varies vastly from conceptualisation to
more narrowly oriented ecological, economic or social analysis. For instance, studies which are focused on
conceptual development, such as “Resilience, adaptability and transformability in social-ecological systems”
(Walker et al., 2003) and on ecological systems such as “Regime shifts and ecosystem services in Swedish
coastal soft bottom habitats: when resilience is undesirable” (Troell et al., 2005) were classified as Eco-R;
studies which stated economic perspectives, such as “Resilience in the dynamics of economy-environment
systems” (Perrings, 1998), or which concentrate on economic resilience, such as “Economic resilience to natural
and man-made disasters: multidisciplinary origins and contextual dimensions” (Rose, 2007) were categorised as
Econ-R; research which mainly discusses resilience from social perspectives, such as “Social and ecological
resilience: are they related?” (Adger, 2000), was categorised as Soci-R; while those studies which discuss
resilience in terms of sustainability, such as “Resilience and sustainable development: building adaptive
capacity in a world of transformations” (Folke et al., 2002), or in the context of integrated social, economic and
ecological systems, such as “Incorporating resilience in the assessment of inclusive wealth: an example from
South East Australia” (Walker et al., 2010) were classified as Sust-R.
The total number of 919 cited publications includes journal articles (661 or 71.9%), books (63 or 6.9%),
conference papers (61 or 6.6%), working papers (54 or 5.9%), book chapters (41 or 4.5%), reports (23 or 2.5%),
theses (9 or 1.0%), and short comments (7 or 0.8%).
Fig. 2 Comparison of resilience research in different contexts
Note: Sust-R – resilience thinking in the context of sustainability; Scoi-R – resilience thinking for social systems;
Econ-R – resilience thinking for economic systems; Eco-R – resilience thinking for ecological systems
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