Evidence of citation bias in the pesticide ecotoxicology literature

As scientists, we are tasked with letting evidence guide our conclusions. In the world of pesticides this takes on added importance as the data can influence ecological and human health outcomes and regulations, and even the manner in which we grow food. Yet, there seems to be a reticence to engage...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Ecotoxicology (London) 2018-09, Vol.27 (7), p.1039-1045
Main Authors: Hanson, M. L., Deeth, L. E., Prosser, R. S.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis
Atrazine
Atrazine - toxicity
Bias
Citation analysis
Earth and Environmental Science
Ecological effects
Ecology
Ecotoxicology
Environment
Environmental Management
Health aspects
Herbicides
Herbicides - toxicity
Impact factors
Journal Impact Factor
Pesticides
Publication Bias - statistics & numerical data
Studies
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
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Summary:As scientists, we are tasked with letting evidence guide our conclusions. In the world of pesticides this takes on added importance as the data can influence ecological and human health outcomes and regulations, and even the manner in which we grow food. Yet, there seems to be a reticence to engage with the totality of the pesticide ecotoxicology literature, especially papers that report few or no effects or low risk to non-target organisms. We suspected that these studies would have fewer citations than studies that report significant effects or risk for the same compound, and this would be unrelated to the strength of the study, e.g., high quality studies with few or no effects would be cited less frequently than weaker studies that reported effects. To investigate this, we examined a subset of literature around the herbicide atrazine. We found that papers reporting an effect had significantly more citations per year than those that did not ( p  
ISSN:0963-9292
1573-3017
DOI:10.1007/s10646-018-1918-4