Core Conservation Biology Monographs: A Citation Analysis

While natural resources conservation and wildlife management have had a long history, the discipline of conservation biology only formally began in the 1980s with the formation of the Society for Conservation Biology. The former fields have tended to focus on management of resources for human use. An analysis of monographs cited in eight selected issues of the journal Conservation Biology between 1987 and 1996 resulted in a list of 47 titles important to researchers in this discipline. The sample is not random, but was selected to include representative issues every three years from the journal’s inception to the present. Over half of the monographs were from related disciplines such as ecology, genetics, evolution, population biology, statistics, and natural resources management. This bibliography of core monographs is arranged on the basis of decreasing number of citations, given in brackets. According to the author, many of the monographs could be expected to receive significant use in libraries supporting programs in conservation biology.