Knowledge imbalance in Palaeontology

Based on data in the Paleobiology Database, the majority of fossil collections are located in North America and Europe. A small portion also comes from the East Asian region.
The regions where the most sampled collections are, also tend to be where high income countries with higher Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and available research funding are located.
Most researchers reporting these fossil collections were also based at institutions in high income countries, leading to a greater imbalance to who gets to do research and where.
Most palaeontological publications, as in the rest of academia, were in English, with a smaller portion in Spanish, German and French, showing clear evidence of linguistic bias.
But research output is not only linked to economic growth but also other social dimensions such as life expectancy, education and the standard of living as well as political stability.

We only focus on publications published betweeen 1990 - 2020.

Proportions of fossil collections in:

Northern America: 29.37 %
Northern & Western Europe: 14.53 %
East Asia: 9.16 %

Last updated 31 January 2021.

Proportion of fossil collections per region, income class and countries

Hover over the sections to see the details.

The darker regions represents the regions, income classes or countries with the the highest number of fossil collections.

In general, regions like Europe and Americas (mostly Northern America) have the most number of fossil collections in their regions. Lower income countries, especially most of Africa and parts of Asia tend to have a lower number of fossil collections in the region.

High income countries in general also produce more researchers in average. With the availability of more research funding, these researchers have higher mobility as to where they can go to conduct fieldwork as compared to other income groups.

This is especially true for Northern America and most of Europe, which shows a major concentration of the source of publications in the field of palaeontology.

Through centuries of colonialism, neocolonialism, Cold War expansionism, and, most recently, globalization, English has become the world’s most dominant language in academia (as well as in other sectors). The monopoly of the English-language in scientific journals means that scholarly interests are controlled by a specific group of researchers. This is bias clearly exists in our data, which is mostly curated by researchers from English-speaking countries or countries with high English proficiency.

Did you know that countries with higher English proficiencies tend to have better economies?

The interaction between English proficiency and economic performance is a virtuous cycle, with improving English skills driving up performance, which in turn give governments more funds to invest in language training. Countries with higher English proficiency spend a significantly larger share of their GDP on research and also tend to have more researchers per capita.

Proportions of fossil collections in:

Proportion of fossil collections per region, income class and countries

Did you know that countries with higher English proficiencies tend to have better economies?

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