When I worked for a major academic publisher in the early 2000s, Christmas came twice a year: once in December and once when the annual Journal Citation Reports came out.

The JCR, published every year since 1975, ranks academic journals against each other. Each journal receives something called an “impact factor,” a calculation based on how many papers a journal publishes and how many times its papers are cited by subsequent research within two years.

This is a very big deal in scientific circles. The higher the impact factor, the more readily the publisher can sell a journal to libraries and other institutions and the more likely the journal is to receive high-quality submissions. That, in turn, helps keep future impact factors high.

It’s not a perfect system. Smaller journals — such as those from the Global South or those covering narrow topics — don’t get cited as often, so they may not receive a high impact factor.

That doesn’t mean they don’t have an impact, though: Recent research found that these smaller, niche journals actually have a greater effect on policy — particularly when it comes to protecting endangered species.

Meanwhile there are plenty of other ways to assess a journal’s impact. Media mentions are also a big deal, and many journals now publish statistics for each paper’s news links or social-media shares. It could be argued that nonscientific citations have a greater effect on policy and public perception than anything else.

So let’s dive into those smaller journals and share the latest science from other conservation journals around the world. Below you’ll find more than three dozen papers that grabbed my attention in the past few weeks. They cover “vampire” birds, hungry monkeys, feral cats, roaming lions, the wildlife trade, and more. Most of the articles are open access, so they should be available to researchers (and any other interested readers) around the globe.

Will they also shape policy? That remains to be seen, but some of these papers have only been downloaded a couple of hundred times as of this writing, so let’s give them a fighting chance.

• • “Animal-borne sensors reveal high human impact on soundscapes near a critical sea turtle nesting beach” (Biological Conservation)
  • “Are vehicle strikes causing millions of bee deaths per day on western United States roads? Preliminary data suggests the number is high” (Sustainable Environment)
  • “Camouflage or Coincidence? Investigating the Effects of Spatial and Temporal Environmental Features on Feral Cat Morphology in Tasmania” (Ecology and Evolution)
  • “Climatic drought and trophic disruption in an endemic subalpine Hawaiian forest bird” (Biological Conservation)
  • “Conserving genetic diversity hotspots under climate change: Are protected areas helpful?” (Biological Conservation)
  • “Counterillumination reduces bites by Great White sharks” (Current Biology)
  • “Diurnal Activity Budgets and Feeding Habits of Grivet Monkey (Chlorocebus aethiops aethiops) in Fragmented Moist Afromontane Forest” (African Journal of Ecology)
  • “Environmental Conservation and the Bulawayo CBD as a Linguistic Landscape Construction: An Ecolinguistics Perspective” (Journal of Asian and African Studies)
  • “Fabulous but Forgotten Fucoid Forests” (Ecology and Evolution)
  • “Facing the heat: nestlings of a cavity-nesting raptor trade safety for food when exposed to high nest temperatures” (Animal Behaviour)
  • “Great Gerbils (Rhombomys opimus) in Central Asia Are Spreading to Higher Latitudes and Altitudes” (Ecology and Evolution)
  • “Large Reductions in Temperate Rainforest Biome Due to Unmitigated Climate Change” (Earth’s Future)
  • “Lead-based ammunition is a threat to the endangered New Zealand Kea (Nestor notabilis)” (Conservation Letters)
  • “Madagascar’s proposed domestic rosewood trade undermines species protection and exposes fatal flaws in the CITES regime” (Madagascar Conservation & Development)
  • “Native plants play crucial role in buffering against severity of exotic plant invasions in freshwater ecosystems” (Biological Conservation)
  • “Nearly half of Colombian artisan craft plant species lack national and international vulnerability assessments” (Ecosystems and People)
  • “Predicting conservation priority areas in Borneo for the critically endangered helmeted hornbill (Rhinoplax vigil)” (Global Ecology and Conservation)
  • “Predicting the potential habitat of bears under a changing climate in Nepal” (Environmental Monitoring and Assessment)
  • “Requiem for Argentine mammals: A spatial framework for mapping extinction risk,” (Journal of Nature Conservation)
  • “Sacred Groves and the Conservation of Forest Genetic Resources: a review” (Egyptian Academic Journal of Biological Sciences)
  • “The Trojan seahorse: citizen science pictures of a seahorse harbour insights into the distribution and behaviour of a long-overlooked polychaete worm” (Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences)
  • “‘Vampire birds’: diet metabarcoding reveals that migrating Woodchat Shrikes Lanius senator consume engorged camel ticks in a desert stopover site” (Journal of African Ornithology)

The Interplay of Lions and African Wild Dogs

These papers, which examine some of the same species but share no authors, deserve to be looked at in unison:

• • “Long-Distance, Transfrontier Carnivore Dispersals in Southern Africa” (Ecology and Evolution)
  • “Spatial Risk Effects From Lions Compound Impacts of Prey Depletion on African Wild Dogs” (Ecology and Evolution)
  • “Droughts reshape apex predator space use and intraguild overlap” (Journal of Animal Ecology)

Focus on Microplastics

This month also featured a lot of research on microplastics — as many as 10 papers a day, by my count. Here’s a small selection focusing on microplastics’ effects on wildlife. This weighs a little more heavily on subscription-access papers, but many of these are open access.

• • “Bibliometric Insights into Microplastic Pollution in Freshwater Ecosystems” (Water)
  • “The dual role of coastal mangroves: Sinks and sources of microplastics in rapidly urbanizing areas” (Journal of Hazardous Materials)
  • “Ecotoxicological Impact of Cigarette Butts on Coastal Ecosystems: The Case of Marbella Beach, Chile” (Sustainability)
  • “From insects to mammals! Tissue accumulation and transgenerational transfer of micro/nano-plastics through the food chain” (Journal of Hazardous Materials)
  • “Is pollution giving fish a headache? Biomarker analysis in fish brains from Danube floodplain” (13th International Symposium Kopački Rit: Past, Present, Future 2024)
  • “Microplastics alter the functioning of marine microbial ecosystems” (Ecology and Evolution)
  • “Microplastics and terrestrial birds: a review on plastic ingestion in ecological linchpins” (Journal of Ornithology)
  • “Microplastics in Animals: The Silent Invasion” (Pollutants)
  • “Polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE) microplastics affect angiogenesis and central nervous system (CNS) development of duck embryo” (Emerging Contaminants)
  • “Unraveling Plastic Pollution in Protected Terrestrial Raptors Using Regurgitated Pellets” (Microplastics)

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Our next column will be a bit different: We want to share researchers’ favorite peer-reviewed papers of 2024. For consideration, drop us a line at tips@therevelator.org and use the subject line TMICS. Send us a link, your name and institution, and 1-3 sentences about why you think readers should check out your paper. We’re eager to hear from you, especially if you’re from the Global South or an institution without much public-relations support. (Deadline: Dec. 10, 2024.)

Previously in The Revelator:

This Month in Conservation Science: ‘The Earth Is Dying, Bro’