Data from: A persistent lack of international representation on editorial boards in environmental biology

The scholars comprising journal editorial boards play a critical role in defining the trajectory of knowledge in their field. Nevertheless, studies of editorial board composition remain rare, especially those focusing on journals publishing research in the increasingly globalized fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Using metrics for quantifying the diversity of ecological communities, we quantified international representation on the 1985–2014 editorial boards of 24 environmental biology journals. Over the course of 3 decades, there were 3,827 unique scientists based in 70 countries who served as editors. The size of the editorial community increased over time—the number of editors serving in 2014 was 4-fold greater than in 1985—as did the number of countries in which editors were based. Nevertheless, editors based outside the “Global North” (the group of economically developed countries with high per capita gross domestic product [GDP] that collectively concentrate most global wealth) were extremely rare. Furthermore, 67.18% of all editors were based in either the United States or the United Kingdom. Consequently, geographic diversity—already low in 1985—remained unchanged through 2014. We argue that this limited geographic diversity can detrimentally affect the creativity of scholarship published in journals, the progress and direction of research, the composition of the STEM workforce, and the development of science in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and much of Asia (i.e., the “Global South”).

期刊编委会成员是塑造其所在领域知识发展轨迹的核心力量。然而，针对期刊编委会构成的研究仍较为匮乏，尤其聚焦于发表于日益全球化的科学、技术、工程与数学(STEM)领域研究的期刊相关研究。本研究采用量化生态群落多样性的指标，对24种环境生物学期刊1985年至2014年的编委会成员国际代表性进行了量化分析。在这30年间，总计有来自70个国家的3827位不同科学家担任过这些期刊的编委。编委会规模随时间持续扩张：2014年在职编委数量为1985年的4倍，编委所属国家的数量亦同步增长。然而，来自“全球北方(Global North)”（即人均国内生产总值[GDP]较高、集体集中全球绝大多数财富的经济发达国家群体）之外的编委仍极为稀缺。此外，所有编委中67.18%的人员均任职于美国或英国。因此，早在1985年就已偏低的地域多样性，至2014年仍未得到改善。本研究认为，这种有限的地域多样性会对期刊刊载学术成果的创新性、科研进展与研究方向、STEM劳动力构成，以及拉丁美洲、非洲、中东与亚洲大部分地区（即“全球南方(Global South)”）的科学发展产生负面影响。