Overcoming the curse of knowledge: guidelines for reporting system-specific details of host infection and migration dynamics.

Literature syntheses link knowledge across study systems and regions. However, specific details on the biological systems of the included publications may not always be explicitly outlined because of communication gaps (a.k.a. The Curse of Knowledge) and/or knowledge gaps. These gaps can lead to inappropriate comparisons across studies if researchers unfamiliar with the systems make inaccurate assumptions about aspects of study design or natural history. In the context of movement ecology, a growing number of publications explore how host infection and host migration intersect, work that is critical for predicting how global change will impact both animal movement and parasite transmission. Given the complexity of host and parasite life histories, these studies may be particularly vulnerable to knowledge and communication gaps. To minimize communication gaps and highlight knowledge gaps, we developed a checklist with 15 specific elements separated into three categories about migration, parasites, and sampling that should be addressed within a publication to provide a more complete picture of the study system for a non-specialist. We validate our checklist in three ways. First, we use two worked examples to show the information each element reveals. Second, we apply our checklist to a database of 36 publications on migrating infected hosts to quantify which details are typically missing from the published literature. Third, we create a try-it-yourself example based on a fictional study system to illustrate the challenges associated with extracting information on an unknown system. All but one of the publications assessed were missing information on at least one checklist element and 11 were missing more than half. Our checklist is therefore a tool that researchers can use to broaden the impact of their studies and facilitate cross-species comparisons and syntheses. We hope this work stimulates interest in the value of reporting guidelines and encourages researchers to apply this approach to other aspects of animal ecology that might similarly suffer from the Curse of Knowledge.