Cumulative number of published articles that quantified biotic homogenisation (BH) (left axis; black line) based on a literature search using “(biotic OR taxonomic OR functional OR phylogenetic) AND (homogenization or homogenisation) AND (similarity OR Jaccard OR Sorensen OR Sørensen OR Bray-Curtis OR Raup-Crick)” as key terms in ISI Web of Knowledge and Google Scholar, compared to the cumulative number of articles containing the term “biotic homogenization” in the Abstract or keywords (right axis; grey dotted line) resulting from a broader search of the literature using “biotic homogenization” OR “biotic homogenisation”. Only those studies that quantified changes in beta-diversity over time (i.e. the definition of homogenisation) were included. The inset illustrates the number of reported estimates of biotic homogenisation across all studies according to the major biogeographical zones.