Abstract

Entomopathogenic nematodes have achieved a place in biological control programmes because of their effectiveness, speed of action, innocuousness to non-insect targets and simplicity of mass production. However many challenges derived to the lack of knowledge in some critical steps from laboratories to their use in the fields, have to be resolved in order to improve their performance and to reduce the mass production costs. For those reasons, studies on entomopathogenic nematology have increased considerably in the last few decades. Also, there have been important changes in the ways that results are published; many of them relate to major transformations in scientific trends. Using bibliometric tools we characterize variations in number, types of journal, countries of origin, research topics and the number of participating countries, of 1923 papers (from 1980 to 2010) reported in several on-line editorial databases. (c) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.