Tropical marine sciences: Knowledge production in a web of path dependencies.

Scientific agenda setting is critical at all levels of research, but can be strongly influenced by structural path dependencies of the science system itself. In this article we examine how knowledge production is shaped by interconnected path dependencies using the field of tropical marine sciences as a global case study. We use scientometric analysis methods on an original data set of 1328 peer-reviewed journal publications to examine publication trends including a co-authorship network analysis, links between author origin and research locations as well as a quantitative analysis of terminology use over space (i.