  This bibliometric study of a large publication set dealing with research on
climate change aims at mapping the relevant literature from a bibliometric
perspective and presents a multitude of quantitative data: (1) The growth of
the overall publication output as well as (2) of some major subfields, (3) the
contributing journals and countries as well as their citation impact, and (4) a
title word analysis aiming to illustrate the time evolution and relative
importance of specific research topics. The study is based on 222,060 papers
published between 1980 and 2014. The total number of papers shows a strong
increase with a doubling every 5-6 years. Continental biomass related research
is the major subfield, closely followed by climate modeling. Research dealing
with adaptation, mitigation, risks, and vulnerability of global warming is
comparatively small, but their share of papers increased exponentially since
2005. Research on vulnerability and on adaptation published the largest
proportion of very important papers. Research on climate change is
quantitatively dominated by the USA, followed by the UK, Germany, and Canada.
The citation-based indicators exhibit consistently that the UK has produced the
largest proportion of high impact papers compared to the other countries
(having published more than 10,000 papers). The title word analysis shows that
the term climate change comes forward with time. Furthermore, the term impact
arises and points to research dealing with the various effects of climate
change. Finally, the term model and related terms prominently appear
independent of time, indicating the high relevance of climate modeling.

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