By now, many have become aware that I am stepping away from the journal in my current role as Editor-in-Chief. It is a strange title for a person whose main job is much like pulling on a rope for a large kite in the wind, explicitly ignorant of when and from where the wind patterns are scheduled to change, while asking others to provide guidance on the quality of the wind. It has been an honor to serve this community, and I step aside with great respect for the professional practice element of this readership. I leave with humility in having your trust. I hope that I have honored that trust. I suggest that you can all join me in thanking the ISA leadership team (specifically Lindsey Mitchell), the large number of volunteer Associate Editors (past and present), and myriad volunteer reviewers who donate their time to make your research journal a reality. Further, in that action, we acknowledge their contribution to both advancing our understanding and stewarding the foundations of our collective profession in tree care and management. We all stand protected as a science-driven profession by the collective effort of that volunteer bulwark.
These institutional moves cause moments of reflection which can be nostalgic and/or informative. I ask you all to walk with me for a moment and look toward the informative. Much as we can look for patterns in forest succession and change by looking backward as an objective informant to adaptive management planning going forward, let’s all look into the journal’s recent past to suggest where we’re collectively seeking to advance. From that vantage point, we can suggest what is getting left behind at our peril and where we are collectively growing in a positive direction. Much of this is my sole opinion, which stands opposed to the purpose of this journal, but I beg your tolerance, for it is my conceit to generate a collective pause and spirited conversation as an industrial discipline. My effort is a glancing first volley and will not be comprehensive, but it might provide the fuel for a better conversation by the younger generation of really smart folks who are indeed the future of this society. It is, however, my insistence that, in a world where our technology outstrips the pace of our practical understanding across the broad array of species, regions, and systems, we do indeed stop…
…and consider what is needed. I ask you to consider how we critically value and evaluate what is “flash” versus what is “substantive” in a scientific view and in a management applications perspective. I want to give voice to a larger aspirational challenge as to how we both inform and give equitable voice to research from all regions, regardless of their access to the newest equipment or comprehensive literature bases within their regional or political reality, as an informant for a global profession. I seek to move us beyond the arbiter of the “novel” and the “cutting edge,” to fill species and regional gaps in our understanding and our global reality. I contend that we need to “backfill” for myriad species, regional variations, and environmental contexts, and contend with the drudgery of occasionally proving the obvious in a new context as we challenge to verify assumptions for the discovery of nuance through organized observations. With that contention, we need a better community effort to frame new works within such an organized frame which does not always come through in a literature review. I seek for us to return to the quality of the question, acknowledging that species or regional difference provides novelty in an intellectual sense. The process (and I might suggest particularly with trees on a temporal, geographic, and mechanical scale) has always been iterative to describe the inherent messy variability that comes with biological questions and ecological systems.
I had asked Lindsey Mitchell for a listing of all of the article titles and keywords for all articles coming from this journal from 1990 to the end of 2019 to look at rough patterns in our society’s research dialogue as reflected in this journal; a list of 1310 entries. The first point to be made is that we did not consistently use keywords until 1999, and there are a number of years before we learned to mechanically remove title and keyword redundancy. I chose word clouds as a useful way to visualize our journal’s content. Not an original idea: I had seen a more sophisticated network mapping process deployed to great effect by Paul Gobster in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning (2014), which looked at an overview of 40 years over multiple journals using titles, keywords, and full abstracts, along with citation index impact ratings.
From the 34,942 word compilation, I developed a series of word clouds representing the decades of 1990 to 1999, 2000 to 2009, 2010 to 2019, and a cumulative 30-year word cloud. These have been rendered by a free word cloud generator, Monkey Learn (2019), which offers an advantage of providing both a frequency of word/phrase output and a relevance indicator. The system is based on word mining with artificial intelligence to match terms to their root terms and tenses within a “stemming” process to generate the frequency count by terms. A relevance ranking of each term in the list (within the chosen text) is essentially an algorithm code based on a term frequency-inverse document frequency process to determine most likely query terms for the totality of the text (in our case, a listing of terms as titles and keywords within a single text paste into the online tool by decade set or in totality).
I generated clouds on 50, 60, and 70 word/phrase groupings. A process of comparing an edited list and the raw list showed that in the 30-year view, a difference of one phrase occurrence over the 30 most common phrases was observed, and the term “book review” surfaced in the final decade of observations, so the data visualized is from raw data to avoid any influence by my editing choices. I present the 70 word/phrase data and cloud visualizations for this process to capture a bit more information and develop a slightly more informative visualization.
Here is what I generated, and what comes to mind. In terms of total number of titles within the Journal of Arboriculture/Arboriculture & Urban Forestry:
The current trend is not a good one for this journal’s relevance and the profession’s health. As a science-driven professional group, it is much preferred to have access to the supporting literature without a “pay per download” access from a general web search to find decision support and source information. The challenge to this community is to advocate and specifically ask for folks to contribute to this journal. We have a distinct advantage in our contribution fee structure (it’s free to submit) and once published, the information is immediately accessible to practitioners, peer researchers, and students as ISA members, and “free to access” after one year. We have been aware of a gradual shift in content from arboricultural topics to include more urban forestry submissions. This was a principal recognition in our change from Journal of Arboriculture to Arboriculture & Urban Forestry. This shift seems to be verified in these word clouds and offers an insight to consider urban ecological research, which then can loop back to new considerations for tree care approaches and urban tree/vegetation community management. Concurrently, there has been an explosion of journals “awakening” to urban ecology and urban forestry issues which provide alternative outlets for the research we have sought to attract. I also point out that the impacts of research citation indices can influence the author selection of journal publication venue, since many administrative academic reviews have favored such metrics in the absence of a relevant difference between researchers citing researchers versus practitioners using or deploying research. Our data would support our collective sense that AUF has been negatively affected by the rise of the citation index in the past 20 years, and as those indices adapt to account for impact in practice, AUF may see opportunity. Perhaps we might seek to attract aligned horticulture research in a proactive manner as our profession, while focused on trees, has very specific nursery production and woody ornamental considerations.
Table 1 is a summation of the most common phrases and single words derived from the word cloud process. Frequency of occurrence (Table 1) and then relevance (Table 2) is ordered as a top 10 per decade and the top 15 in total. It is notable to look at the patterning of the topic shifts toward the bottom of Table 1 in the decade-by-decade “hot spots” of discourse in the journal, along with some natural linkages in specific terms such as “root pruning” and “anchorage,” and “vegetation management” and “herbicide.” Also notable would be the trends of the increased occurrence counts making the top 10 ranking each decade juxtaposed against the decade-by-decade decrease in total titles. This is best seen by comparing occurrence counts in each decade’s equivalent ranking level without regard to the actual term. Comparing how the top 4 terms oscillate in order is also interesting, but not particularly informative beyond the novel emphasis of decay in the 2000 to 2009 set. We could infer that we are getting more focused into specialized topics, but attracting less work, which is a transition from a generalist’s reference journal toward a perceived niche market of conversation and inquiry. This is an area for all of us to discuss in the near future; I am not at all comfortable with that observation’s implication for the good of the tree care industry.
A listing of derived word cloud terms and their relative occurrence across three decades within the Journal of Arboriculture and Arboriculture & Urban Forestry. Data was developed from titles and keywords. Note: in 2000–2009, the word “tree” (439 occurrences) and the word “urban” (224 occurrences) were dropped from table ranking, but appear in the actual word cloud for that decade 40th and 68th in relevance, respectively. In 2010–2019, the word “root” (168 occurrences) was similarly dropped from table ranking, but appears in that decade’s word cloud 61st in relevance.
A listing of derived word cloud terms and their within-group relevance scores across three decades within the Journal of Arboriculture and Arboriculture & Urban Forestry. Data was developed from titles and keywords.
In 2000 to 2009, the word “tree” (439 occurrences) and the word “urban” (224 occurrences) were dropped from Table 1’s occurrence ranking but appear in the actual word cloud for that decade, 40th and 68th in relevance scoring, respectively. In 2010 to 2019, the word “root” (168 occurrences) was similarly dropped from table ranking but appears in that decade’s word cloud in a constellation of topics. Of course “tree,” occurring 945 times in the raw data, breaks into street, urban, and landscape tree terms, as well as the linkages to “tree growth,” which was most noticeable in the 1990s data subset. One might suppose that the term “urban” became more prominent with our journal’s name change in 2005.
“Urban forest” as the community or system descriptor and “urban forestry” (with “urban forest management” in recent years) as the action and/or motivator are common, as one might suspect. What is a bit surprising is a visual disconnect in what is not in the list as compared to what is in the common practice portfolio in the tree care industries. All but absent in the top listings are terms associated with pruning or soil. Several soil topics do make the word clouds, but fall below the decade-level top 10 listings, as seen in Figures 1–4 and Table 1. Interestingly, the conversations on soil compaction were noted in the 1990s relevance scoring. Prun(e)(ed)(ing) was observed directly in the word list 93 times; 88 times as “prune.” Since the word mining tool is focused on nouns and noun phrases, I assume that with effort and a more complicated software (remember this one was free), the word cloud could be refined, since there is a personal suspicion that the Quercus virginiana and possible Acer rubrum appearances in the clouds are in part related to pruning studies. “Root pruning” has made the most recent decade’s listing. While roots are seen in the listings, there is a potential opportunity to address disconnects with species-root-soil interactions for next generation tree management exploration. I am very sure that we do not know or understand all there is to know and understand in pruning across all species, regions, and physio-chemical responses, nor full context of traditional versus evidence-based management responses on an environmental/cultural interface.
Word cloud of article titles and keywords in Journal of Arboriculture ; top 70 terms for 1990 to 1999.
Word cloud of article titles and keywords in Journal of Arboriculture and Arboriculture & Urban Forestry ; top 70 terms for 2000 to 2009.
Word cloud of article titles and keywords in Arboriculture & Urban Forestry ; top 70 terms for 2010 to 2019.
Word cloud of article titles and keywords in the Journal of Arboriculture and Arboriculture & Urban Forestry ; top 70 terms for 1990 to 2019.
The journal has long been a useful method for placing research into the hands of professionals in the face of disease and pest problems to steward a more resilient landscape while meeting client needs and values. In this, we see an opportunity for attracting manuscripts for the journal, using Dutch Elm Disease, Hemlock Wooly Adelgid, Emerald Ash Borer, root knot nematode (though missing the crucial term “root”), and the more general Plant Health Care as examples. Opportunities in the developing e-DNA tracing research and broader studies on the pest natural history/ecology as informant to management of plant pests could be a useful place to reach out for tactical research for the practical good. Research study informants to IPM or IVM planning and related ecological resilience in the developed landscape could be an apparent avenue for additional and relevant content for this journal.
For all of the educational programming and tool design efforts to address plant selection and the species-to-site linkage in the past 30 years, it is profound to see a total lack of representation in the data set on cultivar evaluations, modelling for survivorship likelihood based on species natural history parameters, breeding selection, or genetics; especially as we engage on national and continental strategies on climate change adaption, restoration forestry, and hopefully the ethics of species movements when the environments change faster than genetic migration capacity in high niche fidelity species and provenance meta-populations.
Region-specific imbalance in manuscript representation is a recognizable occurrence in this process, where it seems “New York City” and “New York” occurs with regularity. The pair of special issues on Sacramento, California’s urban forest, and the more recent pair of issues based on an East Coast US symposium on citizen science, make their marks on the word clouds, with influence on the terms US and United States.
So with a series of observations, I leave the journal in steady hands with Dr. Cecil Konijnendijk van den Bosch as the interim Editor-in-Chief. I take my leave at a time when we need to increase submissions, seek to diversify our themes to update and reflect our totality as a community of practice, and develop roles for the transitioning Editorial Board requisite with an expansion of the journal’s role and citation relevance in the research community. Again, thank you to Lindsey Mitchell for her stellar assistance in these recent years during a major transition at ISA. Many thanks to the Associate Editor team, who are stalwart volunteers and truly dedicated to your journal’s success. Thank you to the many volunteer reviewers who spend countless hours working to evaluate and improve the manuscripts that are submitted to the journal. And as always, thank you to an incredible society membership. May we all meet again in person sooner rather than later as a signal of a return to a safer time.
- © 2020, International Society of Arboriculture. All rights reserved.
Jump to section
Related Articles
Cited By...
- No citing articles found.