ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION OF THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA: EVALUATION OF RESEARCH ACTIVITIES IN THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA COUNTRIES

摘要

The Mediterranean Sea (Med-Sea) is home to 21 countries on three continents. Sustainable management of environmental issues in the Med-Sea countries has become more crucial as the population of those countries bordering the Med-Sea reached around 500 million in 2016, which increases the pressure on environment. This study is aimed to evaluate scientific publications related to major environmental problems of the Med-Sea countries. For this purpose, a bibliometric analysis was carried out and a set of 17 keywords referring the major environmental problems of the Med-Sea countries was chosen and searched in the Web of Science (WoS) core collection database, and Scopus database between 1970 and 2016. The bibliometric analysis is aimed to provide a quantitative analysis of publications using mathematical and/or statistical methods. In this study, publications from each country were identified by the country of the affiliation of at least one author of publication and numbers of publications were used as the indicator of scientific contribution for each country. The study showed that there is an increasing trend in numbers of publications starting from 2000 due to increasing environmental awareness. France, Spain, Italy, Turkey and Greece are the five most productive countries considering the numbers of publications retrieved from WoS and Scopus databases using the selected keywords referring to major environmental problems of the Med- Sea countries.