Figure 1

Results of data mining from biological articles published by 16 top professional journals between 2005 and 2010, inclusive. (a) Positive hits, expressed as the percentage of the total number of biological articles published by each journal in the specified six-year interval, containing either in the title or in the main text at least one expression of the kind ‘lower X’ or ‘higher X’, with X taking the following values: species, organisms, eukaryotes, algae, plants, animals, metazoans, invertebrates, chordates, vertebrates, fishes, reptiles, mammals, primates. (b) Taxon frequency distribution of the articles mentioning lower (gray) or higher (black) representatives of a taxon (n = 17,162, performed on the PubMed data base). (c) The 16 top countries represented in the authors’ affiliations of papers with “lower X” or “higher X” expressions (often with multiple hits per paper), listed in decreasing order of the percentage of positive hits in our search to the total number of articles from the same country presented in the mined (PubMed) database.