A review of reptile research in Malaysia in the 21st century.

This study provides a review of reptile research in Malaysia from the years 2000–2020 to reveal trends and biases that can be leveraged to improve future research and conservation initiatives. Overall, the number of papers published shows an upward trend with an average of 10.1 papers published per year. The clear majority of papers published throughout 2000–2020 were in the field of Systematics (45%, 96 papers), followed by Inventories (32%, 67 papers), Ecology (20%, 43 papers), and Conservation (3%, 6 papers). Within the Systematics category, most papers published between 2000–2011 were solely based on morphology, while integrative taxonomic studies (morphology + DNA) began to dominate from 2012 onwards. When analysed by location, most studies were conducted in Peninsular Malaysia and its associated offshore islands (78%) while the remaining 22% of studies were exclusive to Malaysian Borneo. Our results showed that research is heterogeneous across categories, focal taxa, methods, and location. Some of these biases are inherent to the nature of the study, while others represent areas for improvement. One obvious area that could be improved is the field of conservation, which constitutes only 3% of the studies and has so far focused almost exclusively on turtles. This study highlights gaps and deficiencies in research foci and provides a roadmap for future reptile research planning in Malaysia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]