Abstract
Social science methods are increasingly applied in conservation research. However, the conservation sector has received criticism for inadequate ethical rigor when research involves people, particularly when investigating socially sensitive or illegal behaviors. We conducted a systematic review to investigate conservation journals’ ethical policies when research involves human participants, and to assess the types of ethical safeguards documented in conservation articles. We restricted our review to articles that used social science methods to gather data from local people about a potentially sensitive behavior: hunting. Searches were conducted in the Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar for research articles in English published from January 2000 to May 2018. Only studies conducted in countries in south and Southeast Asia, Africa, and Central and South America were considered. In total, 4456 titles and 626 abstracts were scanned, with 185 studies published in 57 journals accepted for full review. For each article, any information regarding ethical safeguards implemented to protect human participants was extracted. We identified an upward trend in the documentation of provisions to protect human participants. Overall, 55% of articles documented at least one ethical safeguard. However, often safeguards were poorly described. In total, 37% of journals provided ethics guidelines and required authors to report ethical safeguards in manuscripts, but a significant mismatch between journal policies and publication practice was identified. Nearly, half the articles published in journals that should have included ethics information did not. We encourage authors to rigorously report ethical safeguards in publications and urge journal editors to make ethics statements mandatory, to provide explicit guidelines to authors that outline journal ethical reporting standards, and to ensure compliance throughout the peer‐review process.
Highlights
There has been a push to adopt social science methods in conservation (Buscher & Wolmer 2007; Sutherland et al 2018) in recognition of the ability of social science research to improve conservation practice (Bennett et al 2017) and the realization that understanding social systems is imperative to achieve conservation objectives (Mascia et al 2003; Milner-Gulland 2012)
Conservation scientists have been criticized for poor social science research practice and for applying insufficient ethical rigor when conducting research that involves human participants
We found several authors published multiple articles from a specific site or country, presumably from research conducted as part of an extended study
Summary
There has been a push to adopt social science methods in conservation (Buscher & Wolmer 2007; Sutherland et al 2018) in recognition of the ability of social science research to improve conservation practice (Bennett et al 2017) and the realization that understanding social systems is imperative to achieve conservation objectives (Mascia et al 2003; Milner-Gulland 2012). Despite the increasing emphasis on interdisciplinarity, social scientists remain a minority within the discipline (Bennett et al 2016). Conservation scientists are trained in natural sciences (Fox et al 2006) and are often poorly equipped to undertake research that requires extensive knowledge of social science techniques (Campbell 2005; Drury et al 2011). Conservation scientists have been criticized for poor social science research practice and for applying insufficient ethical rigor when conducting research that involves human participants (St. John et al 2014).
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