Wednesday, November 5, 2008

Growth of phylogenetics, or at least phylogen*


I'm working on slides for a job talk. I made one that might be of interest to readers of this blog, a plot of number of references with "phylogen*" in any field in Scopus through time (line on the figure, also the position of the blue circles). I also found the number of references with "evolution" or "ecolog*" as well as all combinations of these three terms to make Venn diagrams of the overlap of the terms (using Google Charts). It's interesting to see how the three areas overlap and change in size through time: "phylogen*" is now much more common (up to 38% of the frequency of "evolution") and now overlaps more with references with "ecolog*" than with references with "evolution". I'm sure there are all sort of artifacts and biases, but interesting to look at nonetheless. It does suggest that I should start thinking more about ecologists using TreeTapper.


1 comment:

Brian O'Meara said...

People have asked me about using this figure in their talks/papers/etc. Feel free to do so, just cite me appropriately (basically Creative Commons' "Attribution by" license)