Читать книгу River Restoration - Группа авторов - Страница 17

Although several reviews highlight the increasing place of societal issues within the scientific work devoted to river restoration (Bennett et al. 2011; Smith et al. 2014; Wohl et al. 2015), none of them has focused on a specific analysis of this research field. This introductory chapter offers this analysis; without claiming to be exhaustive, it gives a broad overview of the dynamics at work on the societal stakes of river restoration.

1 What is the magnitude of these dynamics? How are they structured at the international level? The first part of the introduction looks at the way the scientific community is organized within the field. Particular attention is paid to the way in which the work carried out by this community fits within the dynamics of general research on river restoration, but also within work in human and social environmental sciences.

2 The second part then analyzes the main directions taken by researchers working on societal issues of restoration. What are the main problem areas that structure this field of research? In which disciplines or epistemological traditions are they rooted? What are the methodological approaches mobilized in the frameworks of the different projects?

3 Finally, the third part is devoted to the operational commitment of researchers working on societal themes. Do these researchers support the implementation of river restoration projects and policies and, if so, how?

The literature review that we present here is based on a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the body of international scientific articles devoted to river restoration. This body of literature was retrieved from a search of the titles of articles listed in the Web of Science (WoS) using the keywords river*, stream*, restor*, rehab*, renat*, and revit*. In total, this search identified 1677 articles published between 1971 and 2019 by authors from about fifty different countries. The content of these 1677 articles was analyzed and a subset of 121 publications specifically devoted to discussions of human and social sciences (HSS; e.g. historical, philosophical, sociological, economic, geographical, and political) on the theme of river restoration were identified. This collection of literature forms only a sample of the work published in the field, particularly because it prioritizes international articles written in English at the expense of national publications and books written in other languages. Nevertheless, it allows an overview of the relevant publications and, by extension, of the dynamics of HSS research in the field of river restoration. To this end, we base our analysis on scientometric methods (Mingers and Leydesdorff 2015), coupled with lexical analysis methods (Lebart et al. 1998) and content analysis (Berelson 1952) of the publications.