70 years of herpetology in India: insights into shifts in focal research areas and gender ratios among authors

Cyriac, Vivek Philip and Dharwardkar, Sneha and Mital, Anuja and Mohan, Ashwini Venkatanarayana (2022) 70 years of herpetology in India: insights into shifts in focal research areas and gender ratios among authors. In: Amphibia-Reptilia . pp. 1-13. ISSN 0173-5373

PDF amp_rep_2022.pdf - Published Version Restricted to Registered users only Download (1MB) | Request a copy

Abstract

Herpetology in India took off during the British colonial rule with the documentation of herpetofauna. Several studies have outlined the early history of Indian herpetology; however, few have traced the growth of this field since India’s independence. We analyse trends in Indian herpetology focusing on taxa, subfields, and authorship over the last 70 years. Of the 1177 published articles we analysed, 64.9% studied reptiles, 26.5% studied amphibians and 8.6% were general herpetofaunal studies. Frogs, lizards, and snakes being the most diverse herpetofauna groups, each accounted for 20-21% of the published articles and significantly outnumber publications on caecilians (2.3%), salamanders (0.4%), chelonians (12.6%), and crocodiles (4.4%). We found a significantly greater number of publications on Diversity & Distribution (34.2%), Taxonomy & Systematics (21.6%) and Ecology (19.4%) compared to other subfields, and detected a decline in Development, Physiology & Cytology and Evolutionary biology studies over the last four decades (1980-2019). The gender ratio among co-authors was dominated by men with only 29.7% of publications containing women authors. The overall proportion of women authors has not changed significantly over decades, but our analyses detected a significant decrease in women first authors and the proportion of women authors when the corresponding authors were men. Women authors were substantially lower in the subfield of Taxonomy & Systematics, and women published significantly more on amphibians compared to reptiles. Overall, we highlight the growth of herpetology in India from two key viewpoints, scientific pursuits, and gender parity among herpetologists.

Item Type:	Journal Article
Publication:	Amphibia-Reptilia
Publisher:	Brill Academic Publishers
Additional Information:	The Copyright of this article belongs to the Brill Academic Publishers
Keywords:	amphibians; gender bias; India; reptiles; trends in herpetology; women in herpetology
Department/Centre:	Division of Biological Sciences > Centre for Ecological Sciences
Date Deposited:	23 May 2022 05:01
Last Modified:	23 May 2022 10:23
URI:	https://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/72422

Actions (login required)

View Item