120 Years of “Lemurology” - What has changed?

Lemurs, a highly diverse primate group endemic to Madagascar, have captivated the attention of researchers for nearly 120 years. Here, we conducted a literature review and a bibliometric analysis to provide an overview of how various aspects of “Lemurology”, or the scientific studies of lemurs, have changed over time. Focusing only on original scientific articles, we described the trends in the topics and taxa studied, the publication languages, the authorship, and study sites. We used two datasets: one from the Web of Science (WoS; 2,223 articles) and another from three Madagascar-focused journals (MFJ; 329 articles). The observation of lemurs in the wild is the oldest form of Lemurology, starting under the French colonization, and remains the main data source for articles in both datasets. Microcebus and Eulemur are the most studied genera in WoS and Propithecus and Eulemur in MFJ. At this time, no articles are written in Malagasy, but English and French are the main languages used in Lemurology. Although Malagasy scientists are still underrepresented at the international level, there is a recent shift toward an increased number of Malagasy scientists as first and last authors. We found no gender bias in WoS but MFJ exhibited noticeable male author dominance. Most Lemurology has been conducted at the Duke Lemur Center (USA), followed by Kirindy and Ranomafana forests in Madagascar. Lemurology thus shows different portraits at international and local levels, suggesting that unequal access to resources and opportunities may hinder the effective investigation and conservation of lemurs.

Methods
We searched for publications on Web of Science Core Collection (WoS) in September 2022. We used “LEMUR” as a keyword in “All fields” settings and did not set a time limit to review as much literature as possible. Our search was then refined to only include scientific articles, i.e., original peer-reviewed articles, excluding opinion pieces, conference and meeting proceedings, reviews, theses, books, and book chapters. 

We downloaded and consulted all issues of the journal issues of Lemur News, Malagasy Nature, and Madagascar Conservation and Development in early 2023. We then built a dataset from these journals by reading the title and abstract of each scientific article and retaining only those about lemurs. This dataset comprised 329 articles published between 1993 and 2023.