The objective of this paper was to understand trends in modelling over time within sturgeon research and the effects of modelling applications on the scientific community using a bibliometric approach on articles from the ISI Web of Knowledge online database between 1996 and 2012. The results indicate an increasing contribution of modelling within the general field of sturgeon research. The population models analyzed mainly focused upon the impacts of fisheries, dams, stocking, genetics and elasticity/sensitivity analyses. Habitat suitability models, hydrodynamic models, bioenergetic models and general statistical models focused on the effects of habitat availability, species distribution, survival, growth and spawning migrations. The largest number of publications originated from North America, with a regional focus on the West Coast and Mississippi/Great Lakes regions. In contrast, model development and application was lacking for the Aral Sea region and Siberia. Moreover, thus far there were no published population models for northwestern European and Mediterranean sturgeon populations. The models have only been applied to a limited number of species and, with an increased Red List status of a species, the number of publications decreased substantially. Such results should be considered as a warning sign with regard to the effective implementation of conservation strategies for endangered species, given that the development of models is considered a key tool for the optimization of management and protection measures.