Citation patterns of publications using unmanned aerial vehicles in ecology and conservation

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are incorporated as an important part of the toolbox to complement existing methods used in studies in ecology. It is therefore useful to understand how publications concerning those studies accumulate citations over time. In this study I used 213 articles in which UAVs were used in the research and I investigated for potential factors underlying how many citations they received. I used metrics that were already shown to be correlated with the number of citations in other fields, and tested more specific effects, such as the ecosystem, habitat type, or the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List status of the study species. I found that the time elapsed since publication was the only variable explaining the number of citations a publication received. The average number of citations was 12.1 [95% credible intervals: 8.8–16.7] after 2 years and 41.8 [95% credible intervals: 27.1–63.7] after 5 years. In total, <6% of publications had no citations after 1 year and <0.5% of publications after 2 years, which is lower than for the field of biology as a whole. This study allows a baseline to be established, from which we can compare the evolution of the field in the future.