Studying inclusion in international (forestry) science: a bibliometric approach based on researcher contributions to core and non-core journals

This bibliometric study concerns the level of inclusion of researchers in the global scientific community, based on the extent to which they contribute to the so-called publication ‘core’: a set of journals characterised by international scope and citation interconnectedness. An author-level dataset of forestry researchers, compiled from Dimensions and OpenAlex for the period 2005-2022, was analysed. Each researcher was classified into one of seven groups based on the distribution of percentages of ‘core’ and ‘non-core’ forestry publications. The ‘core exclusivity’ and ‘non-core exclusivity’ groups together accounted for nearly 80% of all 115,062 researchers. Notable percentages of researchers in non-core-related groups in forestry also had core-related publications outside of forestry. Regional and country differences were also explored.