Literature review worklog I: treasure hunting

Starting now I am writing a review of biosecurity economics literature in estimating the impacts of invasive species. The idea is to see how others have handled the task of impact estimation and then how we can do a better job in our project.

As always the first stage of a literature review is to collect a set of worthwhile papers, aka, treasure hunting. In the case of biosecurity economics (means "everything economic and related to invasive species" if I correctly understand my supervisor, who coined the term), this is not an easy job because a big portion of papers scattered in the non-peer-reviewed literature.

(By non-peer-reviewed literature, I mean thesis/dissertation, working papers, governmental reports and conference proceedings etc that haven't survived review process of scientific journals or books. )

One major reason for that, as far as I can tell, is most of these non-peer-reviewed publications are not "sexy" enough for journal editors/reviewers, who have a tendency to favor new ideas and methodology. A lot of biosecurity work, on the other hand, have a sole purpose of producing a damage cost/control benefit figure (with $ number attached) so what they presented are new cases with fairly established concepts/methods, which obviously don't impress journal editors/reviewers much.

This problem of conflicting interests was highlighted by my experience today. Only 45 out of 1470 papers, a miserable 3%, fell into the economic category, according to ISI Web of Science. If we only count papers published in "the TOP Journals in Environmental Economics", only 28 made it, in fact, 27 it was, because one paper used the word "invasion" as an analogy.

(I had used "invasi* and econom*" to derive the 1470 papers, which are supposed to have the combination of the two key words in their title, keywords or abstract).

My conclusions so far are: 1) Economics/economy is an attractive word--many papers mentioned it in their title/key words/abstracts without doing anything economic; 2) Only a small group of researchers manage to publish their work in biosecurity economics in top rank journals.

Of course this is just my first try. Next I am going to try other combination of key words, e.g. instead of invas* use non-indigenous. Let's see if I'll have better luck.