Scientists from tropical countries provide important voices for conservation. However, the international conservation literature has been, and continues to be, dominated by developed, temperate countries. Although we note that regional or local language literature has a significant role to play in directing conservation action. A lack of openness of the field towards voices from developing countries is not just a loss for those countries, but a loss for readers in high income countries, who get a misleading view of what the most important issues are for conservation globally. 

Researchers from Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden (XTBG) investigated static time periods, with comparison to fields other than conservation, and data on acceptance rates through an analysis of public patterns in SCImago (www.scimagojr.com). They compared conservation to nine randomly selected other fields between 1996 and 2013, reviewed literature of conservation publications over a longer time series (1980 to 2012), and analyzed acceptance rates in 12 conservation journals (2009 to 2012), broken down by the country of the institutions where the corresponding authors worked. 

Their data analyses showed that in the increase over time in the contribution of corresponding authors from non-high income countries, conservation lagged behind other fields. The contribution of corresponding authors from low income countries had actually declined over 30 years. Changes in journal policy, such as having regional editors, providing editing assistance, waiving fees, could provide short-term correction to that trend, and help ameliorate some disparity between regions. More fundamental changes could be made if conservation funding targeted tropical institutes of higher education, particularly their conservation science programs that stress research as well as practice. 

The study entitled “Increasing geographic diversity in the international conservation literature: A stalled process?” has been published in Biological Conservation.