1. Evidence of citation bias in the pesticide ecotoxicology literature
- Author
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Lorna E. Deeth, Ryan S. Prosser, and Mark L. Hanson
- Subjects
Study quality ,Impact factor ,Herbicides ,Health, Toxicology and Mutagenesis ,General Medicine ,Publication bias ,010501 environmental sciences ,Management, Monitoring, Policy and Law ,Pesticide ,Toxicology ,Ecotoxicology ,01 natural sciences ,03 medical and health sciences ,Human health ,0302 clinical medicine ,Study methods ,Atrazine ,030212 general & internal medicine ,Journal Impact Factor ,Citation ,Psychology ,Publication Bias ,0105 earth and related environmental sciences ,Demography - Abstract
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
- Published
- 2018