Salmon "Hits"

Salmon "Hits"

After surveying the internet and reading studies about salmon conservation in the PNW, I began to become curious how often salmon related topics focused on solely conservation aspects. In other words, I was interested in how often the term "salmon" was associated with conservation aspects versus non conservation topics and how common they were.

In order to accomplish this, I gathered information using Google Scholar. I surveyed the amount of "Hits" that came up for common and/or important topics relating to salmon. By doing this, I was able to create a visual representation of how important salmon conservation issues are in the grand scope of salmon related topics out there. 

*In creating this, I am making the assumption that "hits" = relative importance

Figure 1. Salmon and related topics surveyed on Google Scholar.

Figure 1 shows the number of "Hits" each topic received when searching for in Google Scholar. A promising result shows that salmon+conservation was by far the most common result found. This suggests that the most amount of work and interest in salmon related topics can strongly be suggested to be related to conservation. Almost 75,000 hits came up for salmon+PNW (actually Pacific Northwest ) related issues. This happens to be just as common as roughly +hybrids and +Native Americans related issues and shows its relative importance next to the other categories.

Figure 2 shows an additional 2 topics. The far left category "salmon" shows how common salmon came up when searched for as a lone subject, an occurrence of 1,430,000 times. The far right category shows how often the second most important term came up, "conservation" at 2,690,000 hits.

This data suggests that only 15% of all the possible related salmon topics reference something about salmon and conservation together. When looking at how often conservation issues as a whole reference salmon, a striking 8% is seen. The data presents promising results and suggests that there is plenty of information, work and interest in salmon conservation issues out there on the web.