Date: 29.04.2016

Conservation research is not happening where it is most needed

Biodiversity and the threats to its persistence are not uniformly distributed across the globe and therefore some areas demand comparatively greater scientific attention. If research is biased away from the most biodiverse areas, then this will accentuate the impacts of the global biodiversity crisis and reduce our capacity to protect and manage the natural ecosystems that underpin human well-being.

To show where the research is a priority and where it really happening, who publishes where and how the publishing activity correlates with the costs, we explored the 10,036 articles published on the topic "Nature Conservation" in 2014. In all papers, we identified the country in which the research was conducted and affiliation of the first author. To assess the importance of country for nature conservation and biodiversity conservation, we used the existing indexes. We determined that the United States should be represented in approximately 0.5% of the publications—instead, it was the subject of approximately 17.8% of the publications and was the most studied country overall. On the other hand, only 1.6% of research is happening in five countries of the biggest importance for conservation. As many as 77% Indonesian, 78% Ecuadorian and 100% Papua New-Guinean (PNG) publications were not led by scientists with affiliations in the country. (9 of 14 PNG publications were conducted by scientists from the Czech Republic – K. Sam’s unpublished note). Almetrics scores show that public audiences are really more interested in the publication derived from countries with higher species diversity and only few people read works from American territory. We have also demonstrated a positive correlation between the finances allocated for science in the countries concerned and their publishing activity.

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