Fifty Years of Wildlife Diseases in Europe: A Citation Database Meta-Analysis

Simple Summary In the past decades, wildlife has been progressively recognized as relevant for the circulation of pathogens affecting not only wild species but also humans and domestic animals. Currently, there is no clear picture regarding which pathogens have been the subject of research over the years and how the investigation has evolved over time. Such information would be useful to guide future steps for wildlife disease management. In this paper, we aimed at answering this question by going through the outputs of a citation database, Web of Science, in terms of the number of wildlife disease publications, and the frequency of disease related MeSHs. Overall, the scientific interest increased over time, with a peak in the last 20 years. The focus of research changed over time and shifted to contemporary hot topics, such as zoonoses, conservation-related diseases and emergent diseases. The increasing complexity of diseases related to wildlife is an aspect that should be kept in mind when drafting surveillance and control plans. Although wildlife has progressively been recognized as a booster for the spillover of pathogens to humans and other wild and domestic animals, the interest of scientists in this topic has not been constant over time and uniform in its targets. Epidemiological outbreaks and technological development have contributed to this. Through the analysis of the number of publications from a citation database, we aimed to obtain an indicator of the scientific community's interest towards wildlife diseases over the years. Using Web of Science, bibliographic searches were performed by adding to the basic search string "Wildlife AND Disease" terms detailing topics such as aspect investigated, pathogen type, aetiologic group and species group. For each host species group, the 100 most frequent Medical Subject Headings (MeSHs) related to specific diseases in each decade were extracted. The scientific production regarding wildlife diseases has increased 3.7 times the relative proportion of publications on diseases during the last 50 years, focusing mainly on zoonotic or epizootic pathogens, and with a sharp growth in contemporary hot topics. Wildlife disease scenarios are complex and challenging to approach. Knowing the trends in the scientific interest in the past decades may pose a guide to direct future steps and actions in several fields, from public health to ecosystem management.