Data from: The changing nature of collaboration in tropical ecology and conservation

Collaboration can improve conservation initiatives through increases in
article impact and by the building scientific understating required for
conservation practice. We investigated temporal trends in collaboration in
the tropical ecology and conservation literature by examining patterns of
authorship for 2,271 articles published from 2000 to 2016 in Biotropica
and the Journal of Tropical Ecology. Consistent with trends in other
studies and scientific disciplines, we found that the mean number of
authors per article increased from 2.6 in 2000 to 4.2 in 2015. We modeled
changes in multi-national collaboration in articles using a generalized
linear model, finding that the mean number of author-affiliated countries
increased from 1.3 (± 0.6 SD) to 1.7 (± 0.8 SD) over time, and that
increases were best explained by the number of authors per article. The
proportion of authors based in tropical countries increased, but the
probability of tropical-extratropical collaboration did not, and was best
explained solely by the number of authors per article. Overall, our
analyses suggest that only certain types of collaboration are increasing,
and that these increases coincide with a general increase in the number of
authors per article. Such changes in author numbers and collaboration
could be the result of increased data-sharing, changes in the scope of
research questions, changing authorship criteria, or scientific migration.
We encourage tropical conservation scientists continue to build
collaborative ties, particularly with researchers based in
underrepresented tropical countries, to ensure that tropical ecology and
conservation remains inclusive and effective.