Elsevier

Biological Conservation

Volume 198, June 2016, Pages 78-83
Biological Conservation

Discussion
Increasing geographic diversity in the international conservation literature: A stalled process?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2016.03.030Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Scientists from tropical countries provide important voices for conservation.

  • Geographic diversity in literature ensures feedback between theory and practice.

  • Yet conservation lags in growth of corresponding authorship from tropical countries.

  • Changes in journal policy could provide some short-term correction to this trend.

  • Long-term changes may be best provided by funding higher education in the tropics.

Abstract

Tropical countries are important to conservation because of the threats to the high levels of biodiversity there, but research on conservation science in these mostly developing countries has traditionally been written by foreigners. This disconnect could have serious implications for the practice of conservation, as local scientists can be more effective than foreigners in interacting with practitioners or pushing forward conservation action themselves. These scientists' careers are strengthened by participation in the international literature, and their knowledge about conservation's success in their country provides necessary feedback to the theoretical literature. We assess the past and current status of geographic diversity in the international conservation literature, over 30 years and in comparison to other fields, as well as present acceptance rate data from prominent journals, broken down by the country of corresponding authorship. While the proportion of articles in all fields contributed by low and medium income countries increases over time, the percentage of conservation articles contributed by corresponding authors from low income countries is actually declining. Manuscripts by authors from low income countries were less than half as likely to be published as those from high income countries. We present a list of specific policies that journals can implement to reverse these trends, such as having regional editors, providing editing assistance, waiving fees, and seeking locally focused studies from which globally relevant strategies and lessons can be drawn. We also stress that long-term the problem can best be addressed by funding educational institutions that develop young researchers in the tropics.

Introduction

A central problem for conservation biology is that tropical countries not only hold the most biodiversity in the world (Willig et al., 2003) but also face the greatest threats to biodiversity, primarily in terms of habitat loss, driven by population density and agricultural expansion (Myers et al., 2000, Laurance et al., 2014). Tropical countries have historically been less developed (Sachs, 2001) and remain so even today (Fig. 1A, note the difference in percentage of high income, OECD countries, and low income countries, between tropical and temperate countries), and thus have less resources to study how to conserve biodiversity or mitigate its loss. Hence, the international conservation literature has been, and continues to be, dominated by developed, temperate countries (Fazey et al., 2005, Lawler et al., 2006, Griffiths and Dos Santos, 2012, Habel et al., 2014, Meijaard et al., 2015, Velasco et al., 2015).

The field of conservation science has been justly criticised as not sufficiently relevant to the biodiversity crisis (Habel et al., 2013). The problems are multiple, including not asking the necessary questions (Whitten et al., 2001, Meijaard and Sheil, 2007), not interacting enough with the practitioners (Knight et al., 2008, Laurance et al., 2012), or not encouraging scientists to act on their recommendations themselves (Arlettaz et al., 2010). Yet part of this gap between research and practice could be due to the geographic disconnect between where conservation action is needed and who is conducting the research. Conservation outcomes are largely influenced by socioeconomic and political considerations (Barrett et al., 2001, Dietz et al., 2003). Thus, recommendations made by foreigners may not hold as much weight as those by people native to a country or region. Further, local conservation scientists share the language and culture of the people they live among or the conservation practitioners they work with, and hence may be more effective in changing attitudes and actions towards conservation (Waylen et al., 2010). It is also necessary for researchers from tropical countries to develop their own academic careers to the point where they can secure a seat at the table in a policy debate. To do so, success in the international literature is increasingly required throughout the world (Salager-Meyer, 2008, Franzoni et al., 2011, van Dijk et al., 2014), although we note that regional or local language literature has a significant role to play in directing conservation action. A lack of openness of the field towards voices from developing countries is not just a loss for those countries, but a loss for readers in high income countries, who get a misleading view of what the most important issues are for conservation globally.

A recent call for “inclusive conservation” (Tallis and Lubchenco, 2014), makes it an opportune time to assess geographic diversity (Wardle, 2014), as well as representation of both genders. Here we provide data on the past and present levels of geographic diversity in the international conservation literature, as well as put forth solutions that address the problem. Regarding the data, we emphasise three components that give a comprehensive picture of the literature's diversity: a comparison of conservation to other fields; an analysis over a long time series; and data on acceptance rates broken down by the country of corresponding authorship. The comparative, long-term data are needed because much has changed since the blossoming of conservation biology in the early 1980s (e.g., Soulé, 1985). The economic balance between developed and developing countries has been substantially altered (Spence, 2011), and the publication industry has been revolutionised with new open-access journals that have changed how knowledge is accessed, including that about conservation (Cronin et al., 2014, Gossa et al., 2014). Previous studies that focus on the geographic diversity of authorship in the conservation literature have, however, looked at a static time period (Fazey et al., 2005) or time periods ten years apart (Velasco et al., 2015), without comparison to fields other than conservation. Finally, data on acceptance rates are critical to understand the obstacles that authors from tropical and developing countries need to overcome to publish in the international literature (Primack et al., 2009).

We investigate these questions through (Section 4) an analysis of publication patterns in SCImago (www.scimagojr.com), comparing conservation to nine randomly selected other fields between 1996 and 2013, (Section 5) a literature review of conservation publications over a longer time series (1980 to 2012), and (Section 6) an analysis of acceptance rates in 12 conservation journals, 2009 to 2012, broken down by the country of the institutions where the corresponding authors worked. For solutions, we first focus on the short-term solution of journal policy (Section 7), listing 21 policies that could encourage geographic diversity and presenting data on the current use of these policies by 12 journals that responded to an anonymous survey. But we also see this as a problem that can only be truly addressed by expanding the capacity of educational institutions in the tropics, and in Section 8 we explain how a long-term ‘career development’ focus to conservation funding could have as significant results as funding more concrete conservation action plans.

Section snippets

Analytical methods

We categorised countries by income according to current data from the World Bank (http://data.worldbank.org/about/country-and-lending-groups); all categories that are not high income were pooled together as NHI for some analyses. For Fig. 1A, we added a country into the temperate or tropical/subtropical category if it included any land area in those zones (using 30° latitude as divider between temperate and subtropical, Corlett, 2013; countries were included in both categories if they spanned

Statistical analysis

We used simple linear regression to investigate the proportion of publications contributed by low income countries over time in the SCImago analysis, and Fisher's Exact Tests (two-tailed) for contingency table analysis. Acceptance rate was modelled by generalised linear models with the acceptance rate of a country in a journal (binomial distribution) explained by the fixed factors of income class (HI vs. NHI), language of the country (English, English as one of multiple languages, and

The contribution of low income countries to the international conservation literature, relative to other fields

In the SCImago analysis, we found that in the proportion of publications per capita contributed by non-high income countries (NHI; including low income [LI], lower middle income and upper middle income; 2013 data), conservation was below average, ranking 7th among 10 fields in this measure (Fig. 1B). Notably, in the increase over time (1996–2013) in this measure, conservation was ranked the lowest (10th of 10), with less than half the increase of all subjects (Fig. 1B). This result is driven in

Changes in geographic diversity over a thirty year period, from a literature review

The review of 743 papers showed that the proportion of field studies in the tropics and subtropics conducted by tropical or subtropical institutions, as judged by corresponding authorship, did not significantly change between early (1980, 1985, 1990), middle (1995, 2000, 2003), and recent (2006, 2009, 2012) time periods (Fig 1C). In comparison, research in temperate countries was almost exclusively conducted by temperate institutions. When categorising corresponding institutions by income

Acceptance rate data, analyzed by the country of the corresponding author institution

In total, the mean acceptance rate of NHI countries was 0.58 times that of the HI countries; for LI countries this value was 0.46 (Table 1). Per capita submission rates and the impact factor of accepted articles were also lower in these NHI countries than in the HI countries, with a few exceptions (see Table 1). In a generalised linear mixed model explaining acceptance rate, journal impact factor was the most important determinant, with income class (HI vs. NHI) close behind (Table 2). An

Suggested changes to journal policy that encourage geographic diversity

One take-away message from this study is that the conservation literature has diminished its traditional openness towards corresponding authors from LI countries. A short-term solution for increasing the representation of these countries is at the level of journal policy. In Table 3, we list policies that have the potential to encourage geographic diversity at different stages of the manuscript review process. To better prepare the manuscript for review and increase the chances of publication

Policy recommendations relating to institutional capacity of higher education in tropical countries

A longer-term solution is to develop institutional capacity in tropical, developing countries (Sodhi and Liow, 2000, Bawa et al., 2008, Meijaard et al., 2015). While many students who go abroad for higher education return to their native country, others stay abroad, drawn by the greater career opportunities abroad (Docquier and Rapoport, 2012). High-quality in-country educational institutions could retain this talent. Further, many of the students trained in programs in conservation biology do

Conclusions

Our data analyses lead us to the conclusion that in the increase over time in the contribution of corresponding authors from non-high income countries, conservation lags behind other fields, with the surprising result that the contribution of corresponding authors from low income countries has actually declined over 30 years. Some of these problems related to funding inequalities between regions may be intractable. However, changes in journal policy as recommended here may help ameliorate some

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the journals that offered their acceptance rate data. We also appreciate the help of C. Baruah, S. Broerse, M. A. Burgman, M. Ferrar, D. Hawksworth, K. A. Hobson, I. V. Petrescu-Mag, A. Mullie, N. Ockendon, E. Rantanen, J. C. Senar, W. J. Sutherland, and I. Witkowska in this process, and two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. E.G. is grateful for the support of the 1000 Talent Recruitment Program of Global Experts

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