Poster, Climate Change Health and Ecology, Uppsala: 2010-09-01 - 2010-09-03
Abstract:
Recently, the growing body of literature illuminates the impact of climate change and globalisation on vector-borne infectious diseases in Europe. The perception of determining factors is controversial and differs between diseases. Dealing with questions of infection diseases regarding genetical, virological or physiological issues, scientists of biology, human medicine and veterinary sciences already have build networks. Today this relationship is reflected in the World Wide Web: hundreds of thousands of scientists around the world are integrated in scientific social networks like Biomed-experts. Climate and global change issues and their ecological impacts are widely investigated by ecologists and scientists from geo and environmental sciences. The question arose, if relations between these scientific groups are established to solve research queries in the field of mosquito-borne diseases and climate change and global change issues. Therefore we addressed three main questions: i. Scientific disciplines: Which discipline dominates literature on vectors and pathogens in a rapidly changing European environment? ii. Citation behaviour: Do scientists consider results of other disciplines to extend their expertise? iii. Multidisciplinary collaborations: Which options of multidisciplinary collaborations exit? Here, we conducted a literature survey in the ISI Web of Knowledge over all human mosquito-borne viruses and their vectors in Europe in the context of changing climate and global change. The articles found were attributed to scientific disciplines given by the journal categories they were published in. Furthermore, the citation behaviour within a scientific community was reviewed. Only about a quarter of the relevant articles are dealing with the vector species, the vast majority focus on pathogens. Over 80% of the research articles could be attributed to human medicine and biosciences. Taking the debate further, we highlight options of multidisciplinary communication and collaborations among disciplines.