Data from: A citation-based map of concepts in invasion biology

Invasion biology has been quickly expanding in the last decades, so that
it is now metaphorically flooded with publications, concepts and
hypotheses. Among experts, there is no clear consensus about the
relationships between invasion concepts, and almost no one seems to have a
good overview of the literature anymore. Similar observations can be made
for other research fields. Science needs new navigation tools, so that
researchers within and outside of a research field as well as science
journalists, students, teachers, practitioners, policy-makers and others
interested in the field can more easily understand its key ideas. Such
navigation tools could, for example, be maps of the major concepts and
hypotheses of a research field. Applying a bibliometric method, we created
such maps for invasion biology. We analysed research papers of the last
two decades citing at least two of 35 common invasion hypotheses.
Co-citation analysis yields four distinct clusters of hypotheses. These
clusters can describe the main directions in invasion biology and explain
basic driving forces behind biological invasions. The method we outline
here for invasion biology can be easily applied for other research fields.