Paper 3: Climate Change Adaptation for Neophytes - UPEI Projects

LINKING CLIMATE MODELS TO POLICY AND DECISION-MAKINGFIGURE 1The average number of citations for each range of 25, sorted articles. The most citedarticle was cited 237 times, but the range over the top 25 articles was 67.8. Clearly anon-linear, not quite negative exponential relation ship exists over article citations. Of thecomplete dataset (1167 articles) 35% were not cited even once, while 12% had only1 citation, and 81% were cited ten times or less.a general goal. The top articles in our ranking are from journals not typicallydevoted to climate change research; of the five most cited papers (Wilks, 1992;Walsh, Molyneux et al., 1993; Hulme, Barrow et al., 1999; DeMenocal, 2001;Hughes, Baird et al., 2003), two are in the journal Science, one is from Nature,and one is from the medical journal Parasitology. Additionally, the articles arespread out temporally (i.e. over the 1990s and early 2000s) making them difficultto compare. Not only does it take time to accumulate citations (recentlypublished articles have had little time to disseminate), but the nature of the CCAfield itself has evolved. As alluded to earlier, CCA has only recently emerged inits current form as a field of academic study. Figure 2.0 (CAA articles per year)illustrates the spectacular growth of interest in CCA beginning in the early 1990sas evidenced by the fact that four of the top five CCA journals were establishedafter 1989 (Table 1).54