Research Topic Editor's Note: In its continuing analysis of the citation record of ecology and environmental sciences, the newsletter Science Watch recently took a retrospective look at the rankings of papers in the field. Using a customized database--covering the years 1981 to 1993--of the most cited papers in the discipline, Peter D. Moore, a reader in ecology and chairman of human and environmental sciences in the Division of Life Sciences, King's College, London, looked for hot areas of ecological research. His analysis revealed that the study of plant herbivory was one of the field's most important topics over the last 15 years. In fact, some papers in a list of the 10 most cited herbivory articles during the 14-year period covered by the database are still garnering a substantial number of citations.
Following is Moore's April 1995 Science Watch report. The article--with an update on the numbers of citations each ...
