General patterns in urban ecology articles related to Brazilian fauna: a scientometric analysis

ABSTRACT Urbanization has been growing in recent decades, and it has become one of the greatest threats to the world’s biodiversity. Brazil, which is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, has also shown great urban growth in recent years. However, no study has focused on investigating the patterns of urban ecolo gy research related to the country’s fauna. Thus, the aim of this study is to analyze the patterns of scientific publication on faunal urban ecology, in Brazil. Scientific articles and their citations were surveyed on the Web of Science and Scopus platforms. Articles were selected through their titles and abstracts for further analysis. In total, 3926 articles were recovered, 1282 of them were selected for the analysis. Based on the collected data: although publications started in the 1970s, they only boomed after the 2000s; both the Brazilian Southeastern and Southern regions have the strongest impact on the country’s research; Brazil stands out worldwide for its number of institutions, publishers, journals and authors; research is notoriously interdisciplinary, closely related to assessing diseases; arthropods, mammals and birds are the most often assessed faunal groups. The current results are mainly related to the country’s economic, cultural and biological features. Despite the difficulties associated with this research type, it is expected to encourage more research (like this one) to be developed in the future, to analyze elements that were herein identified (e.g., herpetofauna), but that need in-depth analysis.