Fighting land and soil degradation is in the mandate of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). However, it is often suggested that a lack of scientific guidance has resulted from inadequate institutional mechanisms to channel science into UNCCD decision making, rather than from a lack of research on UNCCD-related issues. To explore this issue in more depth, this study explores the corpus of international publications dealing with land and/or with soil degradation. We extracted information from the ‘Web of Science’. By applying bibliometric methods and data mining, we mapped the key actors (laboratories, teams, and institutions) involved in research on land and on soils. Several filters were applied to the databases in combination with the word ‘desertification’. The further use of text mining software (Tetralogie®) allowed the analyses of similarities and differences between keywords, disciplines, authors, and regions and identifies obvious clusters. Understanding interconnections between these clusters ultimately allowed a first diagnosis of some of the strengths and weaknesses of the scientific community dealing with desertification. This type of detailed analyses can contribute to clarify the scientific landscape at large, and further in-depth studies could lead to improvements in the way scientific advice is channeled into the UNCCD. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.