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Most research in the world is organized around institutions which can be categorized as belonging to different sectors, e.g. higher education, government, health, etc. In this article we have evaluated how countries share and spread their research efforts across these sectors. This is made possible because the Scimago Institutions Rankings (SIR) uses a five-sector classification of the leading 5362 research institutions in the world. It is shown that each country has its distinctive style of sharing and spreading its research efforts across major sectors. Some countries are similar to others (e.g. Spain and the Netherlands, or Iran and Turkey), while some are very different from each other (e.g. Spain and Iran). Various row-wise and column-wise operations on a country–sector matrix allow us to quantify and visualize these styles and spreads, and measure their shares of the global institutional research efforts.

Research effort is unevenly distributed across species, which can cause important biases in our understanding of evolutionary and ecological processes and affect conservation decisions. For example, many shark species remain understudied, despite the fact that sharks play fundamental roles in marine ecosystems and are particularly affected by fisheries. Assessing and acknowledging these differences in research effort across shark species is a key step to improving our knowledge and management of shark populations as it allows researchers to both target species in need of research and control for potential biases when performing comparative analyses. I provide here an index of research effort (the number of articles published between 1978 and 2014 listed in the Zoological Record database) for 509 shark species that can be downloaded and utilized in future comparative analyses. I then show that research effort is not randomly distributed across species within the clade, but is significantly predicted by taxonomy, geography, ecology, life history and extinction risk. For example, large species that occur across a large range of latitudes and at shallow minimum depths have attracted considerably more research. The consequence is a strong bias in our knowledge of sharks towards species that are not an unbiased representative sample of the clade. The database and the patterns demonstrated here call for more awareness of the biases in research effort and their potential consequences, not only for practical considerations such as the interpretation of the results of comparative analyses and the assessment of extinction risk, but also for our basic understanding of the ecological roles of sharks.

Mobile crowdsensing (MCS) is a technique where people with computing and sensing devices such as smartphones collectively share data that are of potential interest to the rest of society. MCS includes two different trends (i) mobile sensing, which shares raw data generated from the sensors that are embedded in mobile devices, and (ii) social sensing, which uses the information shared by people in online social networks (OSNs). In this study, the authors present the timeline evolution of the COVID‐19 pandemic in Spain, and summarise the MCS research efforts that are being undertaken by the Spanish community to address COVID‐19 outbreak. Indeed, the COVID‐19 pandemic is putting today's society at risk; lockdown and social distancing measures proposed by governments are dramatically affecting economies. In this regard, MCS tools can become a powerful solution to provide smart quarantine strategies in periods of a steep decrease of infections, or new outbreaks.

Island ecosystems are disproportionately impacted by the ongoing Anthropocene defaunation. Although reptiles are unusually diverse on islands, and many require urgent conservation information, no overview of island‐restricted reptiles (IRRs) distribution, threat status, and research effort has been carried out. Here, we assessed the research allocation to IRRs, contrasted these patterns with their mainland counterparts, and evaluated the impact of morphological, geographical, and socioeconomic predictors on research effort. Furthermore, we identified species‐based research priorities based on the research outputs, threat status, and taxonomic distinctiveness. We found that although nearly one quarter of the planet's reptiles are IRRs and 30.1% are threatened, only 6.7% of the literature is devoted to IRRs and is biased towards a subset of few species. The Indo‐Malayan realm harbors the greatest diversity of IRRs. Larger and more widely distributed species attracted more studies. In contrast, more recently described species located at higher altitudes were less studied. Most top‐ranking reptile species in terms of research priority were IRRs. Overall, our findings suggest that current research levels are insufficient to inform evidence‐based conservation and emphasize the critical need to target research towards less known species and geographic regions.

This paper first briefly reviews the worldwide development of the size of the university sector, its research merits and authorities' use of incentive systems for its academic staff. Then, the paper develops a static model of a researcher's behaviour, aiming to discuss how different salary reward schemes and teaching obligations influence his or her research merits. Moreover, special focus is placed on discussing the importance of the researcher's skills and of working in solid academic environments for quality research. The main findings are as follows: First, research achievements will improve irrespective of the relative impact quantity and quality of research have on researchers' salaries. Second, small changes in fixed salary and teaching duties will not influence the amount of time academics spend on research and, as such, their research merits. Third, because research productivity, i.e. the number of pages written and research quality increase with the researcher's skills and effort, both these figures signal a researcher's potential when adjusting for his or her age and the kind of research carried out. Finally, because researchers' utility depends on factors beyond salary and leisure time, employers have a number of instruments to use in order to attract skilled researchers in a globalised market. (HRK / Abstract übernommen).

The growth of knowledge and research practices in any discipline is characterised by a trade-off between depth and breadth: we can either invest efforts to learn a little about many things, or learn a lot about few things. In parasitology, breadth of knowledge corresponds to research on biodiversity and taxonomy: the discovery and description of an increasing number of new species. In contrast, depth of knowledge comes from focused research on a few model species, about which we accumulate much detailed information. Breadth and depth of knowledge are equally important for progress in parasitology. In this essay, focusing on trematodes, I demonstrate that current research is rapidly broadening our knowledge (high rate of new trematode species being discovered) but not deepening that knowledge at a comparable rate. The use of model species, with caveats, appears to offer a promising avenue for deeper knowledge. I present a case study illustrating how it is possible to develop new model trematode species at low cost to increase the depth of our understanding in areas including host-parasite ecological dynamics, co-evolution, and responses to environmental and climatic changes. The take-home message serves as a call to action to parasitologists, emphasising the need to focus as much effort on depth of knowledge as we currently invest in breadth of knowledge.

As the global footprint of urban areas expands, there is increasing motivation to conserve biodiversity in these areas. Cities typically develop in fertile, biodiverse locations, and often contain relatively high numbers of threatened species. Despite this, urban landscapes are often overlooked as conservation priorities. Although birds have been extensively studied in urban areas, research effort may not be consistent among species. An unbalanced representation of species and collective tendencies to focus on particular research topics pose a risk to the completeness of our understanding of urban ornithology. Developing a better understanding of how birds are studied in urban areas is crucial to mitigate the risk of biodiversity loss. Here, we conducted a systematic quantitative literature review to determine research effort at the species level for birds in Australian urban areas. We modelled which species characteristics predict the level of species research effort across studies with varying levels of conservation relevance and study themes. We found that studies with a strong link to conservation were uncommon and that most studies targeted broad suites of species rather than specific groups or species. Species characteristics, including species taxonomic group, migratory behaviour, threat status and body mass, were significant predictors of research effort. These results highlight the biases that exist in urban bird research, showing that applied conservation is uncommon and usually broad. Understanding the biases in Australian urban ornithology establishes a foundation for expected biases on other continents, which once addressed will be beneficial to conserving urban bird biodiversity.

In this work, combined efforts by Greek and Turkish scientists produced an updated validated NIS inventory of the Aegean ecoregion, covering 120 years of records up to August 2024. Of the 342 NIS currently present in the Aegean Sea, the majority (281 species) have invaded the South Aegean, followed by the North Aegean (128 species out of 206 NIS). A total of 73 species were added to the list, while 56 were removed. Overall, unaided spread of Lessepsian immigrants from the Levantine Sea and shipping are equally responsible for NIS reported at the regional level. An increase in publications addressing NIS matches the upward trend of NIS since the mid-1990s, which continues to the present day. While unaided introductions of Lessepsian species and/or direct introductions via the Suez Canal peaked in the South Aegean during 2000–2005, they peaked in 2012–2017 in the North Aegean—a decade later. The opposite pattern was observed in ship-transferred NIS. The spatial distribution of introduction hotspots largely reflects the following phenomena/processes: unaided introduction is witnessed initially in the southeastern Aegean Sea; monitoring efforts are concentrated in vulnerable and at-risk areas; and research efforts relate to the spatial allocation of institutions and marine experts working on marine NIS along the Aegean coasts.

Fisheries and marine ecosystems are challenged globally by climate change with subsequent biological and socio-ecological implications. Adaptation represents one pathway by which management agencies can seek to ensure sustainability of these resources for societal well-being, particularly when based on strong scientific evidence. Here, we examined the extent of primary scientific literature that is currently available to inform climate adaption initiatives for Australian fisheries. This is achieved via a systematic literature review for 99 harvested Australian marine species, aimed at identifying primary scientific articles that reported new knowledge of climate-driven biological changes and/or socio-ecological implications. We then assessed the quantity of scientific literature against estimated relative climate sensitivity scores for each species (from a previous study), and investigated factors that may influence relative research effort. We found that two-thirds of species had no peer-reviewed climate-related literature available, and that research effort among Australian fisheries species is most closely related to the number of commercial fish stocks per species, and commercial catch weight. We also found that the south-east and western Australian regions had the most climate-related biological information to support climate adaptation in fisheries management. Nonetheless, although accumulating knowledge of the biological and socio-ecological implications of climate change is important, increasing knowledge alone is insufficient to maintain the productivity and profitability of Australian fisheries in light of projected climate impacts. We suggest that the further use of this knowledge to inform decision-making processes is essential to ensure that climate adaptation options are fully explored, to allow sustainable and productive fisheries.

Endogenous growth models based on micro-foundations predict that total factor productivity (TFP) growth is positively associated with effective research effort. We use macroeconomic-pooled time-series–cross-sectional data for the G7 countries from 2000 to 2017 to provide a robust estimate of this positive effect of research effort on TFP growth.