Mapping the Climate Literature

Synthesis reports, such as those by the IPCC, aim to faithfully provide a complete overview of the entire scientific landscape on climate change. However, the sheer amount of literature on climate-relevant topics is massive and, at the same time, is growing exponentially each year. Therefore, authors of such reports often rely on existing maps, reviews, and meta-analyses.
Here, we provide an analysis of the coverage of the literature on climate change by the IPCC. To do so, we identify synthesis articles cited in IPCC reports and compose a corpus of primary literature these cited articles based their analysis on. We explore the breadth and depth of topics this literature covers and compare the overlap to existing maps of the climate literature and results from queries in scholarly search engines using a comprehensive list of climate-relevant keywords.
We aim to show that this methodology can identify potential gaps in the coverage of large-scale synthesis reports to improve future iterations.