The Conceptual Landscape Of Ancient Dna Research: Current State And Future Prospects

Recent developments in next generation sequencing technologies have triggered a rapid growth in both the volume of ancient DNA (aDNA) sequence data and the number of publications concerning this interdisciplinary field. As the size of scientific literature regarding aDNA and complexity of the field have increased tremendously, it has become difficult to decipher research trends and identify central issues within it based on personal knowledge alone. In this article we've used a bibliometric approach to outline the scope and structure of aDNA research. Publication records concerning aDNA, paleogenetics and paleogenomics from the Web of Science were used to generate a dataset for the creation of bibliographic maps based on text co-occurrence, bibliographic coupling and author co-citation patterns. Three major research areas, five narrower research fields and 13 smaller highly interconnected sub-fields of aDNA studies were identified at different levels of clustering resolution in text co-occurrence analysis. Although the majority of the studies are centered around human population history, the highest average number of citations is associated with the articles, regarding the application of aDNA to evolutionary research. At the same time the most rapidly developing avenue of aDNA research is connected with reconstruction of environmental history (particularly with the use of environmental DNA approach) and conservation genetics.