The state of the late Quaternary megafauna extinction debate : a systematic review and analysis [dataset]

To conduct the systematic review, we queried two major academic databases, Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus (accessed November 2021), for articles related to the late Quaternary megafauna extinctions. Terms were searched for within keywords, titles, and abstracts of papers using the following query: “Megafauna” AND “extinction” AND (“Quaternary” OR “Pleistocene” OR “Holocene”). This search returned 596 unique articles published between 1959 and 2021. The metadata from all retrieved articles was compiled into an Excel spreadsheet, the articles randomized, and evenly distributed among three analysts (MS, CP, MZ) for review.Each article was imported into and coded using MAXQDA (https://www.maxqda.com/), a qualitative data analysis software that enables text highlighting, tagging, and coding. Using these functions, we coded text in each article to answer ten pre-defined questions aimed at capturing how the late Quaternary megafauna extinctions have been conceptualized and studied through time and across different disciplines (Datasets_Paper_list_2025). Articles falling outside the scope of the study were removed based on the exclusion criteria:<br>The Python code used to prepare and analyze the data and conduct the network and citation is included in file - Supplementary Information_2025.