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Nowhere are the effects of climate change more visible than in polar and mountainous regions. To initiate the Interregional Technical Co-operation Project INT/5/153 (2014-2018) on Assessing the Impact of Climate Change on Land-Water-Ecosystem Quality in Polar and Mountainous Regions (funded by the International Atomic Energy Agency and supported by the Joint FAO/IAEA Division of Nuclear Techniques in Food and Agriculture), we built a database containing 769 of the most significant journal papers on the effects of climate change in polar and mountainous regions between 2000 and 2014 (up until the Fifth IPCC Assessment). Using the number of paper citations per year (CPY), we derive the top 50 most cited journal papers published in the 15 yr period. Analysis of the focus of these 'top 50' papers is compared to the IPCC Fifth Assessment (AR5) Report (IPCC 2013) and the full database. Five categories emerged, and after combining the number of papers in each category with the average CPY for the category, research on the impacts of climate change on terrestrial ecosystems (E) in polar and mountainous regions dominated, research on the impact on water resources (W) was second, and the impact on people's livelihood (P) third, with ice and snow (I) fourth and landscape (L) fifth. Landscape (L), in our view, appears to be under-researched and is presumably included in the IPCC Terrestrial Ecosystems category. We propose that policy makers should note this under-representation of high-impact research into landscape processes (erosion and deposition processes), which needs to be addressed in future.