Studies on SESs are regarded as recognizing an emerging “third” space that transcends the sum of singular social and ecological research practices and disciplines (
Folke et al., 2016). Such studies represent a better understanding of the complex and evolving links between ecosystems and human societies (
Fischer et al., 2015). These coupled and compositive characteristics have resulted in methodological pluralism and the formation of a weak coherent methodological identity in SES studies (
Bodin and Tengö, 2012). Although numerous ambiguities remain, SES research has designed nomenclatures with integrated social and ecological components commonly used in the title, keywords, and abstracts of such work (
de Vos et al., 2019). Changes in these nomenclatures reflect changes in the main thematic topic of dryland SES research over time. Therefore, we analyzed 1446 articles collected in the Web of Science using keywords related to dryland SESs. The number of studies published annually in dryland SES research increased from 1 to 235 between 1986 to 2019, and Science of Total Environment, Global Change Biology, and Journal of Arid Environments were the top three journal sources, occupying 2%-3% of all the publications. Based on the raw number of publications, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (62 publications), University of California (54 publications), Chinese Academy of Sciences (50 publications), and the United States Department of Agriculture (46 publications) contributed most to dryland SES research. The lead authors are J. Julio Camarero and Antonio Gazol of CSIC, who contributed to almost 2% of all 1446 papers. We then followed the Co-word method to assess changes in the main topics of interest over time (
Chen, 2017). By counting how frequently each combination of term words extracted from the keywords, abstracts, and titles of different articles occurred in published literature, we could identify the research terms that appeared most frequently in recent years, which were as follows: climate change, resilience, drought, and vulnerability (
Fig. 2). We subsequently clustered all term words and labelled each cluster using the term words occurring with the highest frequency. The most extensive research cluster is related to ecosystem services, landscape functioning, and semi-arid agriculture soils. The typical research terms indicate that extreme drought, drought resistance, drought severity, and tree species have received more interest since 2017. Pine trees in European drylands are the main object of interest in terms of tree species (
Szmidla et al., 2019). However, traditional research topics, such as disturbance and ecosystem functioning, are decreasing in prevalence. The rapid increase in term words used in the cited literature is likely to offer insight into emerging trends.