The jump in network ecology research between 1990 and 1991 is a Web of Science artefact

Borrett et.al. (2014) report a jump in network ecology publications between 1990 and 1991 but fail to find a cause for it. This jump in publication output is not a mystery, but a Web of Science artefact, due to the restriction of this database search to titles until 1990, whilst also abstracts and keywords are systematically searched in Web of Science starting from 1991. Indeed there is no such leap in publication numbers between 1990 and 1991 in Google Scholar. A sudden increase in publication numbers between the years 1990 and 1991 is instead found in Web of Science when searching for a variety of keywords. Until Web of Science allows researchers to consistently search for keywords within abstracts also before 1991, bibliometric research on publication growth rates using Web of Science should avoid comparing the number of publications retrieved before and after 1991. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.