Research Article |
Corresponding author: Eric R. Larson ( erlarson@illinois.edu ) Academic editor: Ingo Kowarik
© 2019 Rachel M. Janovsky, Eric R. Larson.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
Janovsky RM, Larson ER (2019) Does invasive species research use more militaristic language than other ecology and conservation biology literature? NeoBiota 44: 27-38. https://doi.org/10.3897/neobiota.44.32925
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Invasive species research has been criticised for a reliance on hyperbolic or sensationalistic language, including the use of militaristic language that dates to the popularisation of this concept. We sought to evaluate whether the invasive species literature used more militaristic language than other literature across the fields of ecology and conservation biology, given that many research areas in these fields (e.g. competition) may routinely use militaristic language. We compared militaristic language use in journal articles on invasive species or other topics across both applied and basic science journals in the fields of ecology and conservation biology. We further restricted our study to papers where lead-authors were located at institutions in the United States, to evaluate whether militaristic language use varied over peace time and conflict periods for this country. We found no significant differences in the percentage of journal articles that used any militaristic language between either invasive species research or research on other topics, but we did find that invasive species research used a greater frequency (count) of militaristic language per article than research on other topics. We also found that basic rather than applied science journals were more likely to use militaristic language and we detected no significant effect of time period on the usage of militaristic language in the ecology and conservation biology literature. Researchers working on invasive species should continue to be conscientious about their language use on this occasionally controversial topic, particularly in basic science journals.
Alien species, animal behaviour, competition, exotic species, introduced species, literature review, natural enemies, natural defences, non-native species
Invasive species are generally defined as organisms that have been introduced from their native range to new regions of the world by human actions and either: 1) spread rapidly or widely where non-native (
One critique of invasion biology is that this research area lacks objectivity, reflected in part by language use by scientists or managers working on invasive species that may be militaristic, nativist, sensational or xenophobic (
Beyond the use of invasive or invasion with reference to non-native species that cause harm or spread rapidly and widely, other militaristic language has been observed to appear in the literature on these organisms, ranging from descriptors of ecological effects that might include “attack” to descriptors of management interventions that might include “combat” (
We expand on past studies like that of
We compared militaristic language use between research papers on invasive species to those on other topics in ecology and conservation biology for a series of applied and basic science journals over two time periods (peace and conflict). We used American Naturalist, Ecology and Journal of Ecology as basic science journals in our study; each of these journals does occasionally publish articles on applied topics, but were anticipated to be less likely to do so than journals dedicated to applied science in these fields, particularly when published by the same scientific societies (i.e. Ecological Applications). We used Biological Conservation, Conservation Biology and Ecological Applications as applied science journals in these fields; we did not include some relevant applied science journals like Biological Invasions because they did not exist over the entire duration of our study period. We chose these six journals because they are leading journals in the fields of ecology and conservation biology that publish invasive species research and existed for the duration of our study interval.
We restricted our study to papers where the lead authors were located at institutions in the United States, in order to make a comparison of militaristic language use between a relatively peaceful time period for this country following the end of the Cold War (1992–2001) in contrast to an era of heightened military conflict (2002–2011), during which the United States engaged in major wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. We used the institutional address of the first author with the expectation that this was the person most responsible for writing the manuscript (
For each of the six journals included in our study, we sought to quantify militaristic language use in 10 invasive species articles published in the peace time period and 10 invasive species articles published during the conflict period, as well as in 10 articles on other (non-invasive species) topics published in the peace time period and 10 on other topics published during the conflict period. We selected articles for inclusion in this study using ISI Web of Science’s (WoS) Core Collection, restricting searches to the relevant publication titles and time periods (above). We identified invasive species papers as those where the terms “invasive”, “exotic”, “alien” or “non-indigenous” appeared in a WoS topic search and identified all other papers as other topics. We confirmed these classifications during our quantification of militaristic language use in each scientific article (below). We omitted any articles where the address of the lead author was not at an institution in the United States per WoS. We further used WoS to omit any articles classified as opinion, editorials or reviews, restricting our analysis to primary research articles.
Upon compiling a list of candidate articles across our six focal journals for each time period (peace and conflict) and topic (invasive species or other), we used a random number generator to choose 10 from this list for each time, topic and journal combination, summing to 40 total articles considered for each journal. As exceptions, the Journal of Ecology published only two papers on invasive species, and the American Naturalist published only one, during the peace time period. As a consequence, our dataset consisted of 223 (rather than 240) articles analysed for frequency of use of militaristic language (Suppl. material
We then quantified the frequency of militaristic language use in the PDF of each individual article by searching for and counting the following terms: army, attack, combat, defeat, defence, enemy, fight, war, weapon, win and victory. We also searched for variations of the preceding words by tense, parts of speech or plural forms (e.g. fight, fighting etc.). We developed our word list based on militaristic language identified in past research on this topic (e.g.
We first tested whether the percentage of articles using any militaristic language (≥ 1 word) was different between papers on invasive species or other topics across all six journals together (n=6) or within the applied or basic science categories (n=3) using paired t-tests in SigmaPlot 14.0. We did not make this comparison between time periods owing to low replication of invasive species articles for some journals during the peace time period. We next sought to determine if the frequency (count) of militaristic words in articles varied by research topic, journal type and time period. We analysed this zero-inflated count data using generalised linear mixed models (glmm) with the glmmTMB package in R version 3.4.2. We used mixed models in order to include topic (invasive species or other), time period (peace or conflict) and journal type (applied or basic) as fixed effects, while including journal identity (i.e. American Naturalist, Ecological Applications etc.) as a random effect to account for variation between individual journals not included by the broader journal type category (applied or basic). We considered a number of models with different error distributions (e.g. Poisson, negative binomial etc.) and compared model performance with Akaike’s Information Criterion (AIC). We found that negative binomial zero-inflated models best fit this dataset and used these models for our primary analysis.
We found that a minority of research articles in the fields of ecology or conservation biology used militaristic language, as 67 of 223 (30.0%) scientific papers we searched used any of the terms or their variants included in our study. Invasive species articles in basic science journals were most likely to use any militaristic language (18 of 43 articles, 41.9%), articles on other topics in applied science journals were least likely to use any militaristic language (8 of 60 articles, 13.3%) and articles on other topics in basic science journals (21 of 60, 35.0%) or articles on invasive species in applied science journals (20 of 60, 33.3%) were intermediate. Invasive species articles in the basic science journals Ecology (55.0%) and American Naturalist (45.5%) and the applied science journal Biological Conservation (50.0%) had the highest incidence of militaristic language use, whereas articles on other topics in the applied science journals Biological Conservation and Ecological Applications had the lowest incidence of militaristic language use (10% each; Figure
The percentage of articles published in three applied and three basic journals in the fields of ecology and conservation biology using any (≥ 1) militaristic language over our study period in papers either on invasive species or other topics. Each journal by topic (invasive or other) combination had 20 articles evaluated with the exception of invasive species articles for both American Naturalist (11) and Journal of Ecology (12), which had few eligible articles on invasive species prior to 2001 (see main text).
When testing frequency (counts) of militaristic word use in articles, we found that scientific papers in basic science journals and on the topic of invasive species were significantly more likely to use militaristic language than those articles in applied science journals or on other topics (Table
Results of a negative binomial zero-inflated mixed model (glmmTMB package, R Version 3.4.2) on frequency (counts) of militaristic language use in scientific articles in the fields of ecology and conservation biology. These mixed models included time period (peace time or conflict), journal type (applied or basic science) and topic (invasive species or other topics) and also included journal identity (e.g. American Naturalist, Ecological Applications etc.) as a random effect.
Predictor | Estimate (SE) | P-value |
---|---|---|
Intercept | 1.188 (0.403) | 0.003** |
Peace Time | -0.018 (0.284) | 0.949 |
Basic Science | 1.132 (0.499) | 0.023* |
Other Topics | -1.050 (0.330) | 0.002** |
Frequency (counts) of militaristic language use (Table
The most common militaristic language across these 223 articles were variants of attack/attacking (found in 14.3% of articles), defence/defends (found in 13.5% of articles) and enemy/enemies (found in 9.9% of articles). Terms like combat/combatting (2.2%), fight/fighting/fought (1.8%) and battle/battling (0.9%) were relatively rare and some terms like victory/victorious or war were never used in the 223 articles considered.
The study and management of invasive species have been partially linked with militaristic context and language use since their popularisation by
We found that a minority of papers in ecology or conservation biology used any militaristic language (≥ 1 word use per paper), but this use was heterogeneously distributed, with papers in some journals using this terminology frequently and other publications using this terminology rarely. However, we found no significant difference between the percentage of journal articles using any militaristic language in invasive species research relative to other topic areas. We did, however, find that the frequency (count) of militaristic language use was significantly higher in both invasive species papers and in papers published in basic, rather than applied, science journals. We also evaluated whether the time period (peace or conflict) affected militaristic language use, restricting our study to papers lead-authored at institutions in the United States and defining a recent peace time and conflict period. We found no effect of time period on frequency of militaristic language use across these papers, suggesting that researchers in ecology and conservation biology were not necessarily influenced by cultural or historical context with respect to use of militaristic language.
It is perhaps not surprising that invasive species literature uses more frequent militaristic language than other research areas in ecology or conservation biology, given past work and criticism on this topic (
We were surprised to find militaristic language use more common in basic than applied science journals, which ran counter to our prediction that management or conservation-focused articles in applied science journals might be most likely to use militaristic language. Instead, the type of theory-driven research appearing in basic science journals in ecology (i.e.
We recognise that different methods or approaches could be applied to our research question in future work. For example, we developed a word list of militaristic language that we then manually searched for in a random sample of scientific articles. First, our word list is not necessarily exhaustive and could arguably be expanded to include some other terms, or be criticised for our interpretation of included terms as militaristic. Despite the somewhat ad hoc nature of our militaristic word list, we still found some significant differences in language between invasive species and other journal articles, as well as between applied and basic science journals, when analysing word frequency or count. Second, we restricted ourselves to manually searching a random 223 journal articles (of an intended 240), but machine-learning textual analyses could facilitate a much broader search of ecology and conservation biology literature for our question (e.g.
Whether communicating to other scientists, policy-makers or the general public, researchers working in the fields of ecology and conservation biology often seek to use metaphors and other literary devices to make their writing more accessible and engaging (e.g.
We thank Roderick Wilson for early conversations on this research, as well as comments from Tina Heger, Ingo Kowarik and Sara Kuebbing that improved our manuscript, and the Edmund James Scholar Program for undergraduate research at the University of Illinois for support to the lead author’s research.
Papers used in statistical analyses with counts of militaristic language use per paper
Data type: statistical data