Publication practice in Taxonomy: Global inequalities and potential bias against negative results

Abstract

There is broad recognition by practicing taxonomists that the field is going through a crisis, which has been dubbed the “taxonomic impediment”. There are many aspects involved in said crisis, but publication practices in taxonomy are often neglected or relegated to the backseat. We provide an initial foray into this topic via a worldwide survey with taxonomists, spanning all botanical and zoological groups, and career stages. Demographically, most of the respondents identified themselves as males (70%), working in Europe or North America (68%), in universities (50%) or museums (27%). Over half of the respondents are established/late-career researchers (only about 25% of full professors were female), with a low number of early-career researchers and graduate students (i.e., taxonomists in training). Nearly 61% of the men acquired their highest title at least eleven years ago, while only 41% of the women did so. Nearly 92% of the respondents have published new species descriptions, while around 60% and 26% have synonymized, respectively, species-level or subspecies-level taxa. In general, respondents perceive the act of describing new species to be easier than synonymizing species (p = 0.05). Established/late-career researchers and male researchers, particularly in Oceania and North America, found it easier to publish nomenclatural acts such as new species descriptions, while early-career researchers had their acts contested more often. Our results reaffirm the low academic recognition of the field, the lack of funding for research and publishing charges especially in the Global South, and the difficulty in finding specialized outlets (and the low impact factor of those journals) as persistent issues in taxonomy. Other significant problems raised by respondents include ethical issues in the peer-review process, a bias against newcomers in the field coming either from established researchers or committees, and taxonomic vandalism.

Online community photo-sharing in entomology: a large-scale review with suggestions on best practices

“…This overrepresentation of Europe and the United States and Canada is likely explained by multiple factors. First, most taxonomists (68%) work in the United States, Canada, and Europe (Brincalepe Salvador et al 2022). Although only 1.3% of publications dealt with new taxa, many dealt with taxonomy-adjacent topics that are likely to be addressed by taxonomists, such as taxon distribution (42.1%) and introduced species (11.2%) (Table 4).…”

“…There is normally considerable lag time between discovery and publication, especially for certain fields such as taxonomy. For example, at least 163 undescribed arthropod species have been photographed and shared online that have not been formally described, likely due in part to the decline in the number of taxonomists, associated taxonomic impediment, and difficulty in finding undescribed species on some photo-sharing websites (e.g., iNaturalist specifically disallows the creation of species pages for undescribed species, so photos of undescribed species sit unidentified at the genus level; Supplementary File 2 in Engel et al 2021, Brincalepe Salvador et al 2022, Skvarla and Fisher 2023). Other discoveries may not be deemed relevant enough to publish on their own.…”

The Silent Extinction of Species and Taxonomists—An Appeal to Science Policymakers and Legislators

“…obs.). The "unsatisfactory level of recognition [taxonomy] has in academia" is widely experienced in the taxonomic community [86].…”

Introducing ARTiMiS: A low-cost flow imaging microscope for phytoplankton monitoring in engineered and natural environments

“…One major criticism of automated digital microscopy is the lack of sample interactivity: digital images cannot be re-focused or examined at multiple magnifications, unlike live samples on a benchtop microscope. Nonetheless, there has been a consistent decline in the number of professional taxonomists over recent decades 10 . As a result, if phytoplankton monitoring programs lack the time or expertise to routinely perform identification themselves, they must rely on shipping samples to a dedicated phycology lab.…”