Research publications: Who reads this stuff?!

The main product of scientific research is the peer-reviewed publications that announce the results and conclusions of the work. This is why researchers at zoos, museums, universities, research centers, etc. all focus so much on these publications. You’ll note that in many of these Animal Science Blogs, I will highlight a publication that supports the topic of the blog—whether it was a publication produced by researchers at Zoo Atlanta, or some other research chosen relevant to the topic. So, let’s talk about what research publications are, what they indicate, and why we focus on them so much. 

You also may hear the term “peer-reviewed” with respect to a publication or journal. This is important, as it means that the paper you are reading has undergone a rigorous review by academic peers that are experts in the relevant field. Peer-review is the standard that separates information that has been reviewed and vetted by a panel of experts versus just some words that someone put on their website or social media. You can be sure that information in a peer-reviewed article is of good quality—even if subsequent work may reveal it to be flawed in some way that was un-knowable at the time! Science progresses in steps and iterations, so it is perfectly normal for a paper to become outdated in the decades following its publication. 

Another consideration concerns the journal in which an article is published. If we accept the baseline assumption that all peer-reviewed publications are valuable, then it also is true that some scientific journals have a generally broader audience and impact than do others. Most researchers in the sciences agree that the broadest, and thus arguably the three most prestigious, journals are Science, Nature, or Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Science journalists and reporters watch for each issue of these journals to appear and scan them for articles that may interest their readers. So, now you know the basis for the headlines in outlets like CNN or The New York Times proclaiming that scientists have discovered some amazing new phenomenon.

Other types of journals are more topically specific and, while the quality of the work generally is excellent, they may not be of interest to people outside of specific sub-specialties. For example, the journal Behaviour or Journal of Mammalogy publish papers in those particular fields. 

Zoo Atlanta staff have authored or co-authored more than 430 peer-reviewed publications since we developed a research emphasis in the late 1970s, an emphasis that really blossomed when the Zoo re-invented itself in the 1980s and that continues to this day. There is a remarkable legacy of research at our Zoo, and it’s what helped reach the Top-10 list of AZA research institutions in a recent review. Our numbers are on par, or greater, than biology departments at many universities and colleges. We have been busy and productive in bringing fundamentally new information about animals into the realm of known science, so we have a lot to be proud of! 

It is cause for celebration across the Zoo when one of our staff makes a discovery at a level worthy of publication in one of these higher impact journals, and we have done so on a number of occasions! For example, we discovered (Rieser et al., 2021) a completely unexpected connection between a previously unknown microstructure on the bellies of certain snakes that enables the weird sidewinding locomotion that we had been studying; that paper was published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.  

Lastly, one might wonder who reads this stuff? Peer-reviewed articles typically are so specialized and loaded with jargon that they are essentially unreadable to the general person! Consequently, there are no best-sellers or “hits” in any sense, and no one makes any money from these non-commercial publications. Yet, if no one reads them and uses them to inspire future research or to update textbooks, etc., then they really would not seem to be very useful. To keep track of this, there are services like GoogleScholar or ResearchGate that tabulate how often a paper is cited, or referenced, in other publications. The number of times that a paper is referenced is a loose estimate of how impactful, or perhaps useful, a paper may be. I looked up a random sample of publications by Zoo staff over recent years, to give us a rough estimate of how often our work has been referenced by other researchers. These are not exact, so in that sense they are minimum, or conservative, estimates. You will see that there is a wide range of citation numbers. These do not reflect the quality of the paper, but they are a rough estimate of how frequently a paper has been used in the development of subsequent research articles. There also is a time-lag in that it takes a few years for an article to show up referenced in subsequent articles. I would not expect a paper we published in 2024 to yet show very many citations, but check back in 2030 or so! 

So, let’s have a look at our own history! Here are some randomly selected publications by Zoo Staff, preceded in (bold) by the number of times that paper has been cited in other peer-reviewed publications: 

(42) Stoinski, T.S., S. Rosenbaum, T. Ngaboyamahina, V. Vecellio, F. Ndagijimana, and K. Fawcett. 2009. Patterns of male reproductive behaviour in multi-male groups of mountain gorillas: Examining theories of reproductive skew. Behaviour 146:1193–1215.  

(1304) Scheele, B. C., F. Pasmans, L. Berger, L. F. Skerratt, A. Martel, W. Beukema, A. A. Acevedo, P. A. Burrowes, T. Carvalho, A. Catenazzi, I. De La Riva, M. C. Fisher, S. V. Flechas, C. N. Foster, P. Frías-Álvarez, T. W. J. Garner, B. Gratwicke, J. M. Guayasamin, M. Hirschfeld, J. E. Kolby, T. A. Kosch, E. La Marca, D. B. Lindenmeyer, K. R. Lips, R. Maneyro, C. A. McDonald, J. R. Mendelson III, P. Palacios-Rodriguez, G. Parra-Olea, C. L. Richards-Zawacki, M. O. Rödel, S. M. Rovito, C. Soto-Azat, L. F. Toledo, J. Voyles, C. Weldon, S. M. Whitfield, M. Wilkinson, K. R. Zamudio, and S. Canessa. 2019. The aftermath of amphibian fungal panzootic reveals unprecedented loss of biodiversity. Science 363: 1459–1463 

(77) Lind, A. L., Y. Y. Y. Lai, A. K. Mostovoy, A. Holloway, A. C. Y. Iannucci, M. Mak, V. Fondi, V. Orlandini, W. L. Eckalbar, M. Milan, M. Rovatsos, I. G. Kichigin, A. I. Makunin, V. A. Trifonov, E. Schijlen, L. Kratochvil, R. Fani, T. S. Jesso, T. Patarnello, J.W. Hicks, O. A. Ryder, J. R. Mendelson III, C. Ciofi, P. Y. Kwok, K. S. Pollard and B. G. Bruneau. 2019. A high-resolution, chromosome-assigned Komodo dragon genome reveals adaptations in the cardiovascular, muscular, and chemosensory systems of monitor lizards. Nature Ecology and Evolution https://doi/org/10.1038/s41559-019-0945-8 

(7) Hill, R.L., J.R. Mendelson III, and J.L. Stabile. 2015. Direct observation and review of herbivory in Sirenidae (Amphibia: Caudata). The Southeastern Naturalist 14:N5–N9. 

(51) Snyder R.J., A.J. Zhang, Z.H. Zhang, G.H. Li, Y.Z. Tian, X.M. Huang, L. Luo, M.A. Bloomsmith, D.L. Forthman, and T. L. Maple. 2003. Behavioral and developmental consequences of early rearing experience for captive giant pandas. Journal of Comparative Psychology 117:235–245. 

(439) McKenzie, V.J., S. Song, F. Delsuc, T.L Prest, A.M. Olivero, T.M. Korpita, A. Alexiev, K.R. Amato, J.L. Metcalf, M. Kowalewski, N.L Avenan, A. Link, T. Di Fiore, A. Sequin-Orlando, C. Feh, L. Orlando, J.R. Mendelson III, J. Sanders, and R. Knight. 2017. The effects of captivity on the mammalian gut microbiome. Integrative and Comparative Biology doi:10.1093/icb/icx090. 

(670) Langergraber, K.E. K. Prüfer, C. Rowney, C. Boesch, C. Crockford, K. Fawcett, E. Inoue, M. Muruyama, J.C. Mitani, M.N. Muller, M.M. Robbins, G. Schubert, T. Stoinski, B.Viola, D. Watts, R.M. Wittig, R.W. Wrangham, K. Zuberbühler, S. Pääbo and L. Vigilant. 2012. Generation times in wild chimpanzees and gorillas suggest earlier divergence times in great ape and human evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109:15716–15721.  

(1) DeRussy, A., K. Hurst, K. Schaffer, Z. Pu, L. Green, and J.R. Mendelson III. 2013. Social behavior in the context of a limited resource in juvenile tortoises (Manouria emys). Herpetological Journal 23:171–173.  

(120) Kendal, R.L., D. Custance, J.R. Kendal, G. Vale, T.S. Stoinski, N.I. Rakotomalala, and H. Rasaminanana. 2010. Evidence for social learning in wild lemurs (Lemur catta). Learning & Behavior 38:220–234.  

(42) Rieser, J. M., T.-D. Li, J. L. Tingle, D. I. Goldman, and J. R. Mendelson III. 2021. Functional consequences of convergently evolved microscopic skin features on snake locomotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118: 6 e2018264118  

Dr. Joe Mendelson
Direction of Research