One strategy to publish a paper in a top ecological journal, is to combine a hot topic (e.g. ‘habitat fragmentation’) with a sexy subject (e.g. ‘panda’, see for instance Ecological Applications 17:4).
But how about this one in Functional Ecology 21:3 :’Variation in sperm size within and between ejaculates in a cockroach’?
I don’t know what kind of looks Harris gets when he explains what he’s doing during his long shifts in the lab, but I do know it’s not the kind of sexy subject I had in mind.
Because I wondered what kind of animals receive most attention in scientific literature – the cute or the ugly – I searched ISI Web of Knowledge for gorilla, panda or dolphin (sexy) and compared the results with a search for bedbug, flea or cockroach (not so sexy).
Graphs: ISI Web of Knowledge; Images: Wikipedia.org
Against my expectations, our cute animals are not so hot after all. The cockroach and his itchy friends have received far more attention (8618 publications; >100000 citations) than Flipper et al. (5208 publications; just over 50000 citations) during the past 20 years. However, the number of papers on our flagship species is increasing steadily, while the numbers of bug papers per year remains more or less constant. In a few years time, my strategy may prove to be right, but for now, I would say you better use nasty animals to write hot papers.
Wow, very cool analysis. I am also quite surprised at the results. Why do you think that’s the way it is? Is it because nasty little bugs are easier to study?
No, it’s because the nasty little bugs are nasty. Dolphins, pandas and gorillas usually feature in papers about animal behaviour or conservation, subjects that get cited relatively lightly. But cockroaches, bedbugs and fleas are pests and/or disease vectors, so they attract the attention of medical research, which meanz citations. It’s a good job that bedbugs or fleas aren’t the size of gorillas or dolphins, although my children once had some headlice that were, individually, the size of small dogs.
Henry, I also thought medical issues explained this difference. But strangely enough, medicine is not the key domain of bug literature – most of the papers in this search came from entomology, biochemistry & molecular biology, physiology and zoology (categories with more than 10% of the papers each). These categories are followed by more or less medical categories, veterinary sciences, immunology and allergy (each 9-8%). But if you order the papers by the number of citations, it’s a lot of med, clin and diseas.
Health issues might still be the difference, but the problems might be tackled more as problems of biology – applied entomology (i.e. spraying bugs with obnoxious chemicals) is a large (polluted) field.
Pleasingly, mildew (the beast I used to work on) behaves more like a cute animal.