Academic inequality through the lens of community ecology: a meta-analysis.

Shenhua Qian,Shinichi Tatsumi,Akira S. Mori

doi:10.7717/peerj.1457

Abstract

Ecological assemblages are generally characterized by a few dominant species and numerous others. Such unequal distributions of dominance also emerge in human society, including in scientific communities. Here, based on formal community ecological analyses, we show the temporal trends in the number of scientific publication in the discipline of “ecology.” Based on this, we infer possible factors causing the imbalance of reputation and dominance among countries. We relied on 454 ecological meta-analysis papers published from 1998 to 2014, which sourced over 29,000 original publications. Formal meta-analyses are essential for synthesizing findings from individual studies and are critical for assessing issues and informing policy. We found that, despite the rapid expansion of outlets for ecology papers (analogous to an increase in carrying capacity, in ecological systems), country diversity as determined from first author affiliations (analogous to species diversity) did not increase. Furthermore, a country identity was more powerful than the popularity of the scientific topic and affected the chance of publication in high-profile journals, independent of the potential novelty of findings and arguments of the papers, suggesting possible academic injustice. Consequently, a rank order and hierarchy has been gradually formed among countries. Notably, this country-dominance rank is not only specific to this scientific domain but also universal across different societal situations including sports and economics, further emphasizing that inequality and hierarchical structure exist even in modern human society. Our study demonstrates a need for having robust frameworks to facilitate equality and diversity in the scientific domain in order to better inform society and policy.

Highlights

We identified 454 papers that conducted formal meta-analyses in ecology from 1998 to 2014 (‘models that accounted for nested complexity (Methods)’), which sourced from 29,747 original studies
We found that the number of ecology papers based on a meta-analysis is heterogeneous both temporally and spatially (Figs. 1A and 1B)
Prior to performing formal community ecology analyses, we verified that our data were sufficient for this purpose based on the rarefaction curves (Fig. S3)

Summary

Introduction

We used the publication year as a random term because the IF changes through time (generally increasing) such that earlier papers tended to have lower IFs. We used first author’s country affiliation, sample sizes, number of original publications, and four study categories (Fig. S4) as potential explanatory variables. These increases in diversity, in terms of journals and countries, need to be viewed with caution, as they may be a statistical artifact due to the net increase in the number of ecology papers based on a meta-analysis (Fig. 1A).

Results

Conclusion