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Quantifying research waste in ecology

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 6, pages 1390–1397 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Research inefficiencies can generate huge waste: evidence from biomedical research has shown that most research is avoidably wasted and steps have been taken to tackle this costly problem. Although other scientific fields could also benefit from identifying and quantifying waste and acting to reduce it, no other estimates of research waste are available. Given that ecological issues interweave most of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, we argue that tackling research waste in ecology should be prioritized. Our study leads the way. We estimate components of waste in ecological research based on a literature review and a meta-analysis. Shockingly, our results suggest only 11–18% of conducted ecological research reaches its full informative value. All actors within the research system—including academic institutions, policymakers, funders and publishers—have a duty towards science, the environment, study organisms and the public, to urgently act and reduce this considerable yet preventable loss. We discuss potential ways forward and call for two major actions: (1) further research into waste in ecology (and beyond); (2) focused development and implementation of solutions to reduce unused potential of ecological research.

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Fig. 1: Stages of the classical research life cycle.
Fig. 2: Overall estimate of research waste of ecological research based on a meta-analysis of waste at each stage (with examples of causes).
Fig. 3: Estimates of the main components of research waste.

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Data availability

The data needed to reproduce the analyses and create the main text and supplementary figures have been deposited at Zenodo35 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6566100. These include the original effect sizes as extracted from studies and the final set of the effect sizes used in the meta-analysis. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The codes/scripts needed to reproduce the analyses and create the main text and supplementary figures are deposited at Zenodo35 https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6566100.

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Acknowledgements

We acknowledge funding from the Croatian Science Foundation project IP-2018-01-3150-AqADAPT that supported T.K. and M.P.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Rudjer Boskovic Institute, Zagreb, Croatia

    Marija Purgar, Tin Klanjscek & Antica Culina

  2. Department of Biology, University of Osijek, Osijek, Croatia

    Marija Purgar

  3. Netherlands Institute of Ecology, NIOO-KNAW, Wageningen, the Netherlands

    Antica Culina

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A.C. conceived the study and wrote the manuscript draft. A.C. and M.P. analysed the data. M.P., T.K. and A.C. designed the analysis, contributed to data collection, interpretation of the data and the manuscript revisions.

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Correspondence to Antica Culina.

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Nature Ecology & Evolution thanks Matthew Grainger and Alec Christie for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

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Supplementary Information

A. Supplementary Methods, 1. Literature review and meta-analysis, 1.1 Search procedure, 1.2 Inclusion screening, 1.3 Data extraction, 1.4 Data analysis and synthesis. 2. Estimating the percentage of published ecological literature that is not open access. B. Supplementary results – Supplementary Fig. 4, C. References.

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Source Data Fig. 3

Data needed to recreate Fig. 3 (using Fig3_plotting.R script, available at 10.5281/zenodo.6566100). This .xlsx file contains three tabs; each have to be saved as a separate .csv file (with the name corresponding to the Excel sheet name: Dataset_MA_final.csv; Meta_analytic_means.csv; Study_planning_ma_means.csv) to recreate Fig. 3.

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Purgar, M., Klanjscek, T. & Culina, A. Quantifying research waste in ecology. Nat Ecol Evol 6, 1390–1397 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-022-01820-0

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