ArticleScientific reports2021
Biases in ecological research: attitudes of scientists and ways of control.
Article in Scientific reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 56 citations in OpenAlex.
- Effectiveness of perches in promoting bird-mediated seed dispersal for natural forest regeneration: a systematic review.Environmental evidence · 2025Pooled it
- Herbivore diversity effects on Arctic tundra ecosystems: a systematic review.Environmental evidence · 2024Pooled it
- Perceived and observed biases within scientific communities: a case study in movement ecology.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Article
- Potential types of bias when estimating causal effects in environmental research and how to interpret them.Environmental evidence · 2024Article
- A Classification Bias and an Exclusion Bias Jointly Overinflated the Estimation of Publication Biases in Bilingualism Research.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- Place-Based Bias in Environmental Scholarship Derived from Social-Ecological Landscapes of Fear.Bioscience · 2023Article
- Estimating the no-observed-adverse-effect-level (NOAEL) of hormetic dose-response relationships in meta-data evaluations.MethodsX · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The properties of the human mind affect the quality of scientific knowledge through the insertion of unconscious biases during the research process. These biases frequently cause overestimation of the effects under study, thereby violating the reproducibility of the research and potentially leading to incorrect conclusions in subsequent research syntheses. We explored the level of knowledge about biases and attitudes to this problem by analysing 308 responses of ecology scientists to a specifically developed survey. We show that knowledge about biases and attitude towards biases depend on the scientist's career stage, gender and affiliation country. Early career scientists are more concerned about biases, know more about measures to avoid biases, and twice more frequently have learned about biases from their university courses when compared with senior scientists. The respondents believe that their own studies are less prone to biases than are studies by other scientists, which hampers the control of biases in one's own research. We conclude that education about biases is necessary, but not yet sufficient, to avoid biases because the unconscious origin of biases necessitates external intervention to combat them. Obligatory reporting of measures taken against biases in all relevant manuscripts will likely enhance the reproducibility of scientific results.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.