The environmental movement relies on scientific claims to justify its calls for protectionist policies. These claims can be followed in the scientific literature using bibliometric methods such as citation analysis. Citation analysis was used to deconstruct the literature of endocrine disrupting chemical (EDC) sciences as it emerged and developed time from 1980 through 2004. This study explored how the attributes of scientific papers such as topic, journal, experimental model, document type, and support or negation of hypotheses impacted their influence (quantified as times cited) within the field over time. To accomplish this, unique bibliographic data were acquired for each attribute of the more than 3,400 studies identified by keyword searches. Content-specific data (non-bibliographic) were generated for the nearly 500 articles cited ≥45 times. The influence of individual articles on the field of EDC science, and their citation relationships was also visually represented using the bibliometric mapping.
Results demonstrated that a confluence of scientific claims propelled the EDC issue into a prominent position within overall environmental literature. The EDC term appeared nowhere before 1993, but its use rapidly gained traction thereafter until by 2004 it was found in over 3,400 published papers. The results of this study suggest that the influence of individual scientific claims within the literature of EDC science were not random, but were impacted by both bibliographic and non-bibliographic attributes. Temporal variations in the influence of each attribute were also demonstrated.