Six-decade research bias toward fancy and familiar bird species

Human implicit biases toward visually appealing and familiar stimuli are well-documented and rooted in our brains’ reward systems. For example, humans are drawn to charismatic, familiar organisms, but less is known whether such biases permeate research choices among biologists, who strive for objectivity. The factors driving research effort, such as aesthetics, logistics, and species’ names, are poorly understood. We report that, from 1965–2020, nearly half of the variation in publication trends among 293 North American male passerine and near-passerine birds was explained by three factors subject to human bias: aesthetic salience (visual appeal), range size (familiarity), and the number of universities within ranges (accessibility). We also demonstrate that Endangered birds and birds featured on journal covers had higher aesthetic salience, and birds with eponymous names were studied about half as much as those not named after humans. Thus, ornithological knowledge, and decisions based..., , , # Six-decade research bias toward fancy and familiar bird species

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.4f4qrfjpr](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.4f4qrfjpr)

## Description of the data and file structure

In the analysis based on this dataset, we assess how human biases influence the amount of research conducted on 293 North American bird species over the past half-century. We integrated bibliometrics, theories derived from human preference research, and a standardized aesthetic salience scoring system to test whether the remarkable variation in visual traits of North American birds and their geographic distributions explains variation in research effort (number of publications on each species) from 1965-2020. 

***Caption for code:*** R code used to analyze data, run in R v 4.3.1 (R Core Team, 2023).

### Files and variables

#### File: Fischer\_et\_al\_Bird-research-bias\_DATA\_2025.xlsx

**Description:** Dataset used in analysis. The file (xlsx format) consists of two worksheets: 1) list of...,