Scientometric Analysis of the Fisheries Science for the Species of Cynoscion (Sciaenidae: Perciformes) from the Western Atlantic, with Emphasis in the Comparison of the North American and Brazilian Fisheries Catch Data

ABSTRACT

A scientometric analysis was performed for 12 species of Cynoscion from the Western Atlantic to explore the evolution of knowledge and the topics covered between 1945 and 2015. The search was based on the total number of results found in two scientific platforms, ISI Web of Science and SciELO, with emphasis on the documents related to fisheries science. A total of 500 articles were identified, with the most-studied species being Cynoscion nebulosus (213), C. regalis (125), C. guatucupa (87) and C. arenarius (51). Fisheries sciences represent 14% of the literature for Cynoscion, which consists mainly of US and Brazilian documents, accounting for 85.9% of the 69 studies produced by 206 researchers affiliated with 64 institutions. The studies are mainly aimed at fisheries ecology, resource management, stock assessment and fish quality and are mostly (55.3%) based on up to three years of sampling. The considerable presence of artisanal fisheries along the Brazilian coast, the difficulty of monitoring this fishery, and the wide variety of common names that in the absence of taxonomic resolution are inserted in landings data make it impossible to identify which stocks are effectively exploited, limit the use of fish-catch data, and result in fewer fisheries studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Marine fisheries
• pescadas
• coastal
• fisheries statistics
• weakfishes

Acknowledgments

This article is part of the D.Sc. requirements of Sergio Ricardo Santos at the Biodiversity and Evolutionary Biology Graduate Program of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. The authors thank Érica Caramaschi, Leila Pessôa and Pedro Carvalho for their critical review of the article and Márcio Macedo for help with the figures. The authors also thank Editor-in-Chief Sandra Shumway for offering helpful comments that improved the article.

Funding

The authors thank the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) and Fundação Carlos Chagas Filho de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ) for financial support.