Data for: Five decades of biogeography: A view from the Journal of Biogeography

Since the first issue of Journal of Biogeography (JBI) was published in 1974, the discipline and its eponymous journal have grown in scope and consequence. On this 50th anniversary of the journal, we reflect on changes in biogeography and publishing, describe trends of the past five decades, and present lists of the 50 most-cited articles from JBI’s back catalogue. We describe current initiatives intended to chart a course for continued success in the coming 50 years, during what may well be a period of global biogeographic crises., Literature search 
We carried out a search of peer-reviewed literature associated with biogeography research and indexed in Web of Science’s Core Collection using the functions query_wos and pull_wos from the ‘wosr’ package (Baker, 2018) for R statistical software (R Core Team, 2020). For this, we used a search string composed that included variations of the word biogeography as well as articles published in journals associated with biogeography research, as follows: 

\"TS=biogeograph* OR SO=(Journal of Biogeography OR Diversity and Distributions OR Global Ecology and Biogeography OR Ecography OR Global Ecology and Biogeography Letters)

The search resulted in a list of 66,812 references which were considered for further analysis of the main topics addressed in this sample of the literature using topic modelling.
Topic modelling
We used latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) on the combined text of titles and abstracts to assess the dominant themes being discussed in the sampled literature (..., The data and scripts included in this submission can be opened using the free and open R software.