Terrestrial ecologists ignore aquatic ecological literature: A major impediment to cross-fertilization of ideas in ecology

Background/Question/Methods

The search for generality in ecology should include assessing the influence of studies done in one system on those done in other systems.  Assuming that this form of generality, here termed “habitat” generality, would be expressed in citations of research papers, we sampled and analyzed frequencies of terrestrial, marine, freshwater and “other” citations  in community and ecosystem ecology papers categorized as terrestrial, marine and freshwater from seven of the “general” ecological journals with the highest citation impacts. 

Results/Conclusions

Our analysis (total n = 793 habitat papers) revealed striking asymmetry in citation frequencies, with aquatic researchers citing terrestrial papers 9 to 10 times more often than terrestrial researchers cite aquatic papers.  Approximately 76% of terrestrial authors cited no freshwater papers (344/451) or marine papers (342/451) while 30% of freshwater (49/165) and 26% of marine authors (46/177) cited no terrestrial papers.  Summing across all journals, 60% of all research papers (n = 5824) published in these journals in 2002-2006 were terrestrial vs. 9% freshwater and 8% marine.  Since evidence suggests total numbers of terrestrial and aquatic ecologists are more similar than these proportions suggest, the representation of publications by habitat in “general” ecological journals appears disproportional and unrepresentative of the ecological science community at large.  These results imply uneven cross-fertilization of results and ideas between aquatic and terrestrial ecologists.  We suggest such asymmetries should be a cause for concern among aquatic and terrestrial ecologists alike.  For at least three reasons, general journals should strive to increase representation of aquatic research, and encourage greater appreciation of results and ideas from other systems, particularly among terrestrial authors.  First, if ecological progress is a function of both depth and breadth of understanding community and ecosystem dynamics, removing impediments to among-habitat flow of concepts and technical advances should spur progress for the field as a whole.  Second, with increasing evidence that aquatic and terrestrial systems are tightly integrated and intertwined, and increased scientific, societal and political pressure for across-system understanding to help meet the challenge of climate change, leveling the publishing playing field should foster increased scientific communication.  Third, reducing imbalances in access to the high impact journals should diminish their potential consequences on careers, for example, in promotion and tenure decisions.  We argue that a bottom-up approach originating from the community at large, through pressure on societies, journals, editors and reviewers will be the most effective agent of change.