ArticleRoyal Society open science2025
A decade of vertebrate palaeontology research: global taxa distribution, gender dynamics and evolving methodologies.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- #Yourpalaeolife: Interrogating the Status of Fieldwork Among Early Career Palaeontology Researchers.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- A decade of vertebrate palaeontology research: global taxa distribution, gender dynamics and evolving methodologies.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
9 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Using 12 104 publications from 2014 to 2023 in the DeepBone database, this study employs bibliometric methods, including full-text latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) modelling, co-occurrence network analysis and geographic mapping with ArcGIS, to examine three key aspects of vertebrate palaeontology development: geographic distribution of newly established taxa, gender demographics among researchers and research trends. Gender data were analysed using automated tools with manual verification to ensure accuracy, while methodological evolution was investigated through systematic text mining and classification. Among 8336 newly established taxa, mammals (34.72%) and fishes (29.76%) dominate, followed by reptiles (25.34%), birds (7.39%) and amphibians (2.80%). Geographic analysis reveals significant regional disparities, with the USA (13.50%) and China (13.32%) contributing the most, while Africa and Oceania remain under-represented (less than 10%). Gender analysis indicates a gradual increase in female representation from 22.78 to 27.20% over the decade, highlighting the imperative to address gender disparities in vertebrate palaeontology, thereby advancing equity in alignment with UNESCO Sustainable Development Goal 5. LDA topic modelling identifies 15 distinct research topics, encompassing evolutionary biology, cranial and skeletal morphology, dinosaur-bird evolution and human evolution, while co-occurrence analysis highlights the evolution of research methodologies, revealing strong interconnections between phylogenetic analysis (15%), traditional morphological analysis (12%) and high-resolution imaging techniques (9%).
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Registered trials
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