Plants and animals that gain protection by US law owe much more to studies published in small, specialist journals than they do to those published in prestigious titles such as Nature and Science. That’s the finding of a study¹ that tracked citations linked to the Endangered Species Act (ESA), a US law designed to protect and support the recovery of species at risk of extinction.

Given that the ESA has the power to halt logging, construction, problematic fishing practices and other human activities that threaten vulnerable wildlife, getting a species added to it can be an important way for a conservation biologist to help protect populations.

But publishing in the kinds of journal that are more likely to influence the ESA could set conservation researchers back in their careers, says study co-author Brian Silliman, a marine conservation biologist at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. For decisions about who gets hired, promoted or funded, he says, a researcher’s impact is too often equated with the number of citations they receive and the impact factor of the journals they’ve published in (the standard way of calculating a journal’s impact factor is by dividing the number of times all the papers it has published in the past two years were cited in the last year by the total number of papers published in those two years.)

“When you have graduate students who are trying to get jobs, you generally advise them not to publish in taxon-specific journals, because they’re going to be low impact factor,” says Silliman. “Even if it’s great science and it has applications to other systems, it’s a very limited audience and it’s going to be harder for them to get a job.”

This disconnect between what’s valued in academia and what has real-life impact prompted Silliman to ask a graduate class to think of alternative ways to evaluate research. PhD student and co-author Jonathan Choi suggested that they investigate which journals are publishing the studies that are cited in the ESA when new species are added to it.

Choi and his colleagues examined documentation for the 260 species that were added to the ESA by the administration of Barack Obama between 2012 and 2016. They counted 4,836 citations for academic papers published in 785 journals. Categorizing the journals according to their impact factor, they showed that only 7% of ESA citations came from journals with an impact factor of more than 9, whereas 87% came from journals with an impact factor of less than 4 or no impact factor at all. Mid-ranking journals accounted for 6%. Journals that have not been given an impact factor by Clarivate — often because they are not considered influential enough — represented 13% of ESA citations.

The team also created an “ESA listing impact factor”, which was based on the fraction of papers that a journal publishes that go on to be cited by the ESA. The highest ranked journal was Pacific Science, a regional journal with a conventional impact factor of just 0.74.

Collectively, regional journals, such as The Southwestern Naturalist and The American Midland Naturalist, and taxa-specific journals, such as the Journal of the Lepidopterists Society, American Fern Journal and American Malacological Bulletin, were the most important sources of ESA citations, says Choi. Habitat-specific journals such as Coral Reefs and Rangeland Ecology & Management were also important, he adds.

The study, published in Conservation Biology, highlights how conservation law relies on the type of rigorous practical work that is typically published in niche journals but is not rewarded by academic promotion and funding systems.

Greater support needed for fieldwork

Choi is careful to point out that the study’s findings do not devalue the kind of theory-driven science that appeals to high-impact-factor journals. Rather, they emphasize the need to support researchers who want to do other kinds of work, such as long-term population-monitoring studies, without sacrificing their career prospects. “That is really important science when it comes to conservation that we stand to lose if we don’t incentivize this kind of very baseline data collection,” says Choi.