Is Artificial Intelligence Reshaping the Landscape of the International Academic Community of Geosciences?

2025-08-21

AI Summary

This study investigates how artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes the global geoscience research landscape. Drawing on 2000–2023 geoscience publications from Web of Science and Scopus, we employ bibliometric analysis, dynamic topic modeling (integrating LDA and BERTopic), and centrality measures in co-authorship networks to systematically track AI-driven shifts in research output growth, participation of scholars from developing countries, and the evolution of international collaboration structures. Results show that AI significantly accelerates geoscience knowledge production—increasing annual publication growth by 37%—elevates the share of internationally co-authored papers by researchers from Brazil and India by 21%, and transforms collaboration networks from a “core-periphery” to a multipolar, cooperative structure. This work provides the first empirical evidence of AI’s mechanisms for enhancing research equity in geoscience, offering data-driven insights and methodological frameworks to inform global AI4S governance and South–South scientific cooperation.

Technology Category

• Computer Vision: Remote Sensing / Geospatial AI
• Humans and AI: Human-AI Collaboration / Human-AI Teaming
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Geometric, Spatial, and Temporal Reasoning

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Interdisciplinary science discovery with web data mining
• Semantics and Knowledge: Scalable techniques for the creation, curation, publication, maintenance, and consumption of large, Web-based, structured, reusable, knowledge graphs and ontologies
• Graph Algorithms and Modeling for the Web: Foundation models and LLMs for Web-related graphs

Abstract

Through bibliometric analysis and topic modeling, we find that artificial intelligence (AI) is positively transforming geosciences research, with a notable increase in AI-related scientific output in recent years. We are encouraged to observe that earth scientists from developing countries have gained better visibility in the recent AI for Science (AI4S) paradigm and that AI is also improving the landscape of international collaboration in geoscience-related research.

Problem

• AI's impact on geoscience academic community transformation
• Increased AI-related scientific output in geosciences research
• Enhanced visibility for developing countries in AI4S paradigm

Innovation

• Using bibliometric analysis and topic modeling
• AI increasing scientific output in geosciences
• AI improving international collaboration visibility