Scientists often debate on the evolving state of their fields and future research directions, but empirical studies on research trends are rare and this limits our capacity to disentangle perceptions from facts within the mass of available data. We used ecological and paleolimnological approaches to assess how the “community” of words most commonly used in limnological studies presented at the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO) meetings and published in Web of Science have evolved over the last decades. We found that the field of limnology has become increasingly focused on global abiotic research themes, especially in rivers, while there was a decrease in the proportion of organismal studies. We hypothesize that this results from both major influential publications highlighting the importance of framing limnology in a global context and the methodological limitations of organismal studies that prevent data from scaling up as quickly as their abiotic counterparts.

中文翻译：

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森林学是否正在变得越来越非生物，河流化和全球化？

科学家们经常就其领域的发展状况和未来的研究方向进行辩论，但是对研究趋势进行的实证研究很少，这限制了我们在大量可用数据中将看法与事实区分开的能力。在过去的几十年中，我们使用生态学和古湖泊学方法评估了在湖泊学和海洋学协会（ASLO）会议上发表并在Web of Science上发表的语言学研究中最常用的单词“社区”的演变。我们发现，植物学领域越来越关注全球非生物研究主题，尤其是在河流中，而有机研究的比例却在下降。