Translated from our German original by AI. The German text was researched, written, and edited by the Psychedelia Foundation team and remains the authoritative version.
A new bibliometric analysis shows how strongly ethnobotanical research has changed over the past ten years through quantitative and data-driven methods.
At the center of the study “Integrating ethnobotany and quantitative methods” is the development of ethnobotany between 2016 and 2025. The authors examined 1,275 scientific publications from the Scopus database, evaluated systematically according to PRISMA guidelines. The bibliometric analysis drew on tools including the software VOSviewer as well as clustering and network methods.
The results show clear growth in the field. The annual number of publications rose by an average of 12.05 percent over the study period, from 83 papers in 2016 to 231 in 2025. According to the analysis, an accelerating trend is particularly striking, and it was confirmed by polynomial regression models.
In terms of content, a clear shift is visible: away from purely descriptive approaches and toward more algorithmic, data-based methods. Approaches from machine learning, multivariate statistics and network analysis play a central role here.
International collaboration has also increased and now accounts for more than 30 percent of publications. Particularly strong contributions come from India and China, which are emerging as central actors in this area of research.
The study’s authors conclude that the growing integration of data science is transforming ethnobotany into a predictive science. This could allow stronger evidence-based validation of traditional knowledge while improving the search for potentially useful plant compounds (bioprospecting).
For the future, the researchers recommend developing a unified “Computational Ethnobotany Ontology” so that data can be better integrated and large-scale analyzes standardized.
