A case of benign neglect

The sample was also screened for country names to assess the distribution of geographical focus within the records on pastoralism and rangelands. Most countries were mentioned less than five times, but some countries stood out with more than 100 hits: China (406 hits), Mongolia (246 hits), Australia (224 hits), Kenya (163 hits) and Ethiopia (128 hits) (see Figure 16). A few countries withmore than 50 per cent of their land classed as rangelands had no records: the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Swaziland (now known as Eswatini), Ivory Coast, Lebanon and Uruguay. The low number of hits for certain countries, such as Canada and the United States, may be due to writing traditions. For example, domestic journals do not always include the name of the country, but refer instead to a state or a region within a state.

information on pastoralism and rangelands has increased considerably since 2000.

sia

• Compared with literature on rangeland issues, there is little coverage of issues related to pastoralism and very few publications cover pastoralism and rangelands in an integrated way. Within all publications about pastoralism and rangelands, the vast majority (82 per cent) include one or several keywords related to rangelands. Only 20 per cent mention keywords related to pastoralism and 3 per cent covered both pastoralism and rangelands issues. • Keywords that are typically related to natural sciences have more hits than subjects typically related to the social sciences. Furthermore, there appears to be more information regarding basic descriptors (for example, pastoral population, rangeland vegetation, grazing) than there is for more specific issues such as tourism, traditional use or education. • There were only two hits for SDG (from 2013 and 2017) and one hit each for CBD and CCD (both from 2009). • There were very few publications related to technical support issues. Of these, most used the terms ‘veterinary’ and ‘credit/loans’. None or very few publications discussed the effectiveness of aid, cost of inaction or rangeland improvements. • There is a large difference in the coverage of countries in Scopus publications on both pastoralism and rangelands in the few cases where countries were specified. Australia, China, Ethiopia, Kenya and Mongolia had the most coverage, with more than 100 hits in each case. Most countries had only one hit.

Mongolia

Dem. Rep. Korea

gyzstan

Korea

China

tan

Japan

Nepal

Taiwan

Bhutan

Key messages related to the availability of information on pastoralists and rangelands

Bangladesh

Vietnam

India

Laos

Myanmar

Thailand

Cambodia

Philippines

• More than 96,000 academic peer-reviewed publications have covered pastoralism and/or rangelands since 2000. However, this pales in comparison to the 71 million records published in the same time period. • There is far more information in academic publications on issues such as grasslands and livestock than specifically on pastoralism and rangelands. Nevertheless, the amount of

Sri Lanka

Malaysia

Brunei

Palau

Indonesia

Papua New Guinea

Vanuatu Fiji Solomon Is.

Australia

Figure 16: Countries mentioned in Scopus publications on pastoralism and rangelands since 2000 Notes: Red circles indicate countries mentioned, with the size reflecting the number of mentions. Blue countries were not mentioned in the sample searched.

New Zealand

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