WIREs Climate Policy and Governance: Who Cites Which Journals/Books?

Following up on yesterday's post on the WIRES Climate Change Policy and Governance topic, I'm taking a look at the same data (thirty eight articles) from a new angle: which journals, books, and other sources they cite in common.

The top ten sources cited (all of which are journals) are presented in the table below.

Top Ten Journals Cited in WIREs Climate Change Policy and Governance articles.

The significance of these journals is clear in the network visualization below, with the top journals clearly visible in the center.

WIREs Policy and Governance articles (red) and the journals, books, and other sources that they cite (blue).

One interesting point to note is that some journals get a large percentage of their citations from a few papers. For example, Friman and Standberg 2014, which focuses on historical responsibility for climate change, cites the journal Climatic Change nine times, almost a third of that journal's thirty two overall citations. This seems to be due to important articles on historical responsibility that have been published in Climatic Change.

The journal Climatic Change gets around 30% of its citations from one article (Friman and Sandberg 2014).

To illustrate the pattern of some journals being cited more times per article, the chart below shows the top ten cited journals by both the number of WIREs articles citing them (horizontal axis) and the number of times they are cited overall (vertical axis, includes multiple cites by a single paper).

Number of WIREs article citing a journal (horizontal axis) versus the number of times cited overall (vertical axis), with illustrative examples.

Finally, the data for all sources that were cited by at least two WIREs Policy and Governance articles:

Studying Climate Policy and Governance: Mapping Citations

I have recently been thinking about network analysis and visualization as a research analysis tool. One of the ideas I have been considering is mapping citations within individual journals when reviewing the academic literature.

To explore this possibility, I took a relatively small sample of thirty eight articles, which came from the Climate Change Policy and Governance topic in the journal Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change (WIREs Climate Change). I limited the analysis to articles that a) are included in the Scopus database and b) have their references listed there. 

These articles had a total of 2,364 references. Of these, 106 were cited by at least two of the WIREs Climate Change articles. I used this data, Gephi, and the SciencesPo MediaLab's Table2Net tool to create a network visualization which connects two WiREs articles if they cite at least one source in common.

In the following network visualizations, article 1 and article 2 are connected if they share at least one reference in common.

The analysis results in the network below, which includes the thirty two articles that share a reference with at least one other article in the sample. The thickness of a connection shows the number of references in common (Branger et al. 2015 and Laing et al. 2014 at the bottom share nine references in common). The size of each circle shows the total number of shared references an article has (the two largest, Munck af Rosenschold et al. 2014 and Gupta 2010, share twenty one references each with other articles).  

Climate Policy and Governance Articles connected by shared references.

In the following two images, I show two ways of categorizing these articles. The first is based on WIREs Climate Change's own sub-topics, which divide the articles according to their focus (e.g., national policy or private governance). As the map shows, these sub-topics are relatively fragmented across the network.

Climate Policy and Governance Articles: Shared references, color coded according to WiRES Climate Change sub-topics.

The second image below organizes the articles into "communities" based on shared references. Most of these communities include articles from a number of WIREs sub-topics (for example, the yellow community includes articles from the multilevel/transnational, national, international, and cities sub-topics).

Climate Policy and Governance Articles: Shared references, color coded according to network "communities" identified by Gephi.

For now, I'm going to leave the analysis at the descriptive level, but I'm planning to come back to these articles in the near future.

Crossing the 1°C threshold: Science, symbolism, and climate politics

New Scientist magazine recently published an article showing that the world is on track to reach 1°C of global average warming above pre-industrial temperatures in 2015 (in this case, the average from 1850-1899). This is halfway to the 2°C warming limit which has been agreed to in international negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. It is also two thirds of the way to the stricter 1.5°C limit which some countries, notably small island nations, have argued is necessary. The 1°C 'milestone', if it is reached, will come in the same year as the crucial Paris climate negotiations, which aim to secure a global deal to reduce emissions and adapt to climate change.

Source: New Scientist

In many ways, there is not an important distinction between 1°C in 2015, 0.9°C in 2014, or 1.1°C in the future. However, as a researcher studying climate politics, I am very interested to see if and how crossing the 1°C threshold is understood in international negotiations, national policy debates, and the media.

In other words, how will 1°C of warming be framed? Will it be mentioned in media accounts alongside the 2°C limit and the rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere? Will national governments, NGOs, and other political actors such as the European Union refer to 1°C when pushing for more stringent emissions reductions?

And of course, if it is mentioned in policy debates, will this milestone have any effect? It is notoriously difficult to untangle the political effects of ideas and symbols. The most famous example of such an idea attracting a large amount of attention in environmental negotiations is the hole in the ozone layer which was detected during negotiations to limit emissions of ozone-depleting substances. Many participants in those negotiations mentioned the effect the ozone hole's discovery had on them. But even in this case, political scientist Edward Parson has raised doubts that the ozone hole had an important political effect. So studying the 1°C  and its political effects will be difficult.  

On a personal note, when we do 'officially' cross the 1°C threshold, I feel as if a door is symbolically closing on the world I grew up in. Again, I don't believe there is any significant scientific difference between 0.9°C and 1°C. Its importance is symbolic.

And hopefully that symbolism, of climate change being in 'the here and now', will provide a push, however minor, for ambitious climate change policy.