Arboriculture & Urban Forestry 46(6): November 2020 I had asked Lindsey Mitchell for a listing of all of the article titles and keywords for all articles coming from this journal from 1990 to the end of 2019 to look at rough patterns in our society’s research dialogue as reflected in this journal; a list of 1310 entries. The first point to be made is that we did not consistently use keywords until 1999, and there are a number of years before we learned to mechanically remove title and keyword redundancy. I chose word clouds as a useful way to visualize our journal’s content. Not an original idea: I had seen a more sophisticated network mapping process deployed to great effect by Paul Gobster in the journal Landscape and Urban Plan- ning (2014), which looked at an overview of 40 years over multiple journals using titles, keywords, and full abstracts, along with citation index impact ratings. From the 34,942 word compilation, I developed a series of word clouds representing the decades of 1990 to 1999, 2000 to 2009, 2010 to 2019, and a cumulative 30-year word cloud. These have been rendered by a free word cloud generator, Monkey Learn (2019), which offers an advantage of providing both a frequency of word/phrase output and a relevance indicator. The sys- tem is based on word mining with artificial intelligence to match terms to their root terms and tenses within a “stemming” process to generate the frequency count by terms. A relevance ranking of each term in the list (within the chosen text) is essentially an algorithm code based on a term frequency-inverse document fre- quency process to determine most likely query terms for the totality of the text (in our case, a listing of terms as titles and keywords within a single text paste into the online tool by decade set or in totality). I generated clouds on 50, 60, and 70 word/phrase groupings. A process of comparing an edited list and the raw list showed that in the 30-year view, a differ- ence of one phrase occurrence over the 30 most com- mon phrases was observed, and the term “book review” surfaced in the final decade of observations, so the data visualized is from raw data to avoid any influence by my editing choices. I present the 70 word/phrase data and cloud visualizations for this process to cap- ture a bit more information and develop a slightly more informative visualization. Here is what I generated, and what comes to mind. In terms of total number of titles within the Journal of Arboriculture/Arboriculture & Urban Forestry: 1990 to 1999 2000 to 2009 2010 to 2019 545 titles 438 titles 327 titles 389 The current trend is not a good one for this jour- nal’s relevance and the profession’s health. As a science- driven professional group, it is much preferred to have access to the supporting literature without a “pay per download” access from a general web search to find decision support and source information. The challenge to this community is to advocate and spe- cifically ask for folks to contribute to this journal. We have a distinct advantage in our contribution fee struc- ture (it’s free to submit) and once published, the infor- mation is immediately accessible to practitioners, peer researchers, and students as ISA members, and “free to access” after one year. We have been aware of a gradual shift in content from arboricultural topics to include more urban forestry submissions. This was a principal recognition in our change from Journal of Arboriculture to Arboriculture & Urban Forestry. This shift seems to be verified in these word clouds and offers an insight to consider urban ecological research, which then can loop back to new considerations for tree care approaches and urban tree/vegetation community management. Concurrently, there has been an explo- sion of journals “awakening” to urban ecology and urban forestry issues which provide alternative outlets for the research we have sought to attract. I also point out that the impacts of research citation indices can influence the author selection of journal publication venue, since many administrative academic reviews have favored such metrics in the absence of a relevant difference between researchers citing researchers versus practitioners using or deploying research. Our data would support our collective sense that AUF has been negatively affected by the rise of the citation index in the past 20 years, and as those indices adapt to account for impact in practice, AUF may see opportunity. Per- haps we might seek to attract aligned horticulture research in a proactive manner as our profession, while focused on trees, has very specific nursery pro- duction and woody ornamental considerations. Table 1 is a summation of the most common phrases and single words derived from the word cloud process. Frequency of occurrence (Table 1) and then relevance (Table 2) is ordered as a top 10 per decade and the top 15 in total. It is notable to look at the patterning of the topic shifts toward the bottom of Table 1 in the decade-by-decade “hot spots” of dis- course in the journal, along with some natural link- ages in specific terms such as “root pruning” and “anchorage,” and “vegetation management” and “her- bicide.” Also notable would be the trends of the ©2020 International Society of Arboriculture
November 2020
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