Modern Zoology as a “Classical” Branch of Biology has Developed to Play an Integrative Role with a Focus on the Whole Organism
The concept of zoology as a single coherent field arose over the 18th and 19th century. It has been influenced by the systems theory and advances in the modern molecular biological methodology. As a consequence, zoology split into many specialized fields and “organisms” were more and more replaced by “systems”. This study intends to identify conceptual changes in zoological research publications by data mining the bibliographic entries of the online database PubMed for topic-specific keywords that may reveal changes in the ratio of molecular and whole organism level in zoology publications (1918-2017). For this, major and minor topics of the publications were counted with the data mining tool RefViz (Thomson Research). The top 64 of these lists were distinguished to be on the molecular or on the whole organism level. The results indicate an increase in whole organism based zoological publications while those on the molecular level were decreasing.