Taxonomic bias: a persistent issue in ecology and evolution

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 1 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. Scientific hyperfocus on certain organisms slows innovation and hinders the generality of ecological and evolutionary inference. Yet, the extent of taxonomic bias in this field and its potential changes over time remain poorly quantified. By assessing 1,383,803 papers and 612 journals, we show that ecology and evolution research is strongly taxonomically biased. We found that studies on vertebrates, relative to those on invertebrates, (1) became more frequent over time, (2) were more prevalent in higher impact journals, and (3) received a greater number of citations and mentions in the media. However, classifying animals into more specific groups led to context-dependent temporal and attention patterns. We propose a series of urgent affirmative actions to ameliorate taxonomic imbalances in ecology and evolution. https://doi.org/10.32942/X2B094 Ecology and Evolutionary Biology knowledge imbalance, journal citation indicator, journal impact factor, research bias, research impact, taxonomic chauvinism, taxonomic specialisation Published: 2026-04-08 00:58 CC BY Attribution 4.0 International Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare no conflicts of interest. Data and Code Availability Statement: All data and code used in this study are available at https://zenodo.org/records/19451113. Language: English