ArticlePLoS biology2021
Tapping into non-English-language science for the conservation of global biodiversity.
Article in PLoS biology, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 63 papers, 3 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
63 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Do more birds mean more bird-aircraft collisions? A meta-analysis testing a key wildlife management tenet.PloS one · 2026Pooled it
- The study of social animal migrations: a synthesis of the past and guidelines for future research.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Pooled it
- Climate change and the global redistribution of biodiversity: substantial variation in empirical support for expected range shifts.Environmental evidence · 2023Pooled it
- Article
- Enabling conditions for conservation on Indigenous and community lands.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2026Review
- Global review of shorebird tracking data to identify research gaps and conservation priorities.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2026Review
- The role of wild birds in the global highly pathogenic avian influenza H5 panzootic, 2020-2023.npj biodiversity · 2026Review
- Expert perceptions of the relative importance of ecological impacts of biological invasions.PloS one · 2026Article
- Twenty years of marine systematic conservation planning: a global scoping review for good practices.PeerJ · 2026Article
- Public interest in biodiversity and climate change: A comparative culturomics study of China and the UK.PloS one · 2026Article
- Review
- Pollination ecology in the tropical Andes: moving towards a cross-scale approach.Biological reviews of the Cambridge Philosophical Society · 2025Review
- AmphiTherm: a comprehensive database of amphibian thermal tolerance and preference.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Spanish-language text classification for environmental evidence synthesis using multilingual pre-trained models.Environmental evidence · 2025Article
- Web of Science-Based Visualization of Mapping Global Scientific Production on Epstein-Barr Virus-Associated Autoimmune Diseases: A Bibliometric Study.Health science reports · 2025Article
- Language barriers in conservation science citation networks.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2025Article
- Global drivers of the conservation-invasion paradox.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2025Article
- Large reductions in tropical bird abundance attributable to heat extreme intensification.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Exploring gaps, biases, and research priorities in the evidence for reptile conservation actions.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2025Article
- Article
3 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
Authors and funding
63 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The widely held assumption that any important scientific information would be available in English underlies the underuse of non-English-language science across disciplines. However, non-English-language science is expected to bring unique and valuable scientific information, especially in disciplines where the evidence is patchy, and for emergent issues where synthesising available evidence is an urgent challenge. Yet such contribution of non-English-language science to scientific communities and the application of science is rarely quantified. Here, we show that non-English-language studies provide crucial evidence for informing global biodiversity conservation. By screening 419,679 peer-reviewed papers in 16 languages, we identified 1,234 non-English-language studies providing evidence on the effectiveness of biodiversity conservation interventions, compared to 4,412 English-language studies identified with the same criteria. Relevant non-English-language studies are being published at an increasing rate in 6 out of the 12 languages where there were a sufficient number of relevant studies. Incorporating non-English-language studies can expand the geographical coverage (i.e., the number of 2° × 2° grid cells with relevant studies) of English-language evidence by 12% to 25%, especially in biodiverse regions, and taxonomic coverage (i.e., the number of species covered by the relevant studies) by 5% to 32%, although they do tend to be based on less robust study designs. Our results show that synthesising non-English-language studies is key to overcoming the widespread lack of local, context-dependent evidence and facilitating evidence-based conservation globally. We urge wider disciplines to rigorously reassess the untapped potential of non-English-language science in informing decisions to address other global challenges. Please see the Supporting information files for Alternative Language Abstracts.
Indexed as
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.