An index of radioecology, what has been important?

The Journal of Environmental Radioactivity (JER) has been published for the last 20 years, an important time frame for the discipline of radioecology. Certainly the study of radioecology accelerated following the Chernobyl incident. As the discipline moves forward, there will be less emphasis on that incident, and scientists will find a new focus. Issues related to waste management and decommissioning may come to the fore. There is also a large effort world-wide to deal more quantitatively with the estimation of dose and consequences to non-human biota. All researchers in radioecology will have opinions on what topics are important now and will be important in the future. Indeed, Policy Board members and Associate Editors of JER have provided a number of Editorials in the Millennium Editorial Series with their perspectives. This paper explores the trends among papers published in JER since 1995, using the ScienceDirect on-line search capability to objectively categorize the papers and quantify the relative numbers of contributions. Obviously, this is somewhat imperfect, but it does provide an index of what has been important in radioecology, and provides some quantification to recent statements about the future of radioecology.