I had a lot of fun playing on Web of Science last week when I was trying to figure out whether parasitism is underrepresented in the ecological literature. At one point, I accidentally sorted by author instead of journal, and I realized that I could easily generate a list of The Most Prolific Parasite Ecologists of the 21st Century! And so I did!
I searched Web of Science for any papers with parasit* as the topic, while excluding anything with parasitoid as the topic. I only searched in the years 2001 to 2013, because apparently the year 2000 doesn’t count as the 21st century. Finally, I narrowed the search results down to include only these journals: PNAS, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Oecologia, Oikos, Ecology, American Naturalist, Journal of Animal Ecology, Ecology Letters, Functional Ecology, Trends in Ecology Evolution, Ecological Applications, Journal of Applied Ecology, and Journal of Ecology. Using this method, the top 30 most prolific parasite ecologists of the 21st century are:
- HIDDEN MOMENTARILY FOR DRAMATIC EFFECT
- AP Moller
- PJ Hudson
- KD Lafferty
- BR Krasnov
- H Richner
- M Boots
- D Ebert
- PTJ Johnson
- AF Read
- LH Miller
- A Buckling
- FJ Ayala
- JC de Roode
- MA Duffy
- SR Hall
- P Schmid-Hempel
- S Morand
- CE Caceres
- J Jokela
- AM Kuris
- S Gandon
- IS Khokhlova
- D Mouillot
- RE Ricklefs
- WH van der Putten
- S Altizer
- DH Clayton
- T Day
- A Fenton
And the Golden Cercariae Award for The Most Prolific Parasite Ecologist of the 21st Century goes to: Robert Poulin! Runners up get free access to everything on the Parasite Ecology blog for a year. 😉
So, my search method obviously had some issues. For instance, a few people who are probably more parasitologists than parasite ecologists made it onto the list, most likely because I included PNAS in my list of journals. Also, the exact order of authors is a bit finicky, because some authors only differed by one or two publications. That means that including slightly different journals might jumble the order. But in general, I’d say that this is a pretty good list! If you’re wondering, you needed to get at least 13 publications in the journals that I listed to make it in the top 30 – roughly one publication per year, on average.
Who do you think the Most Prolific Parasite Ecologist of the 20th Century was?
Parasite Ecology 
I was a PhD student of Robert Poulin – I’ll inform him of your verdict as I am sure he will be delighted 😉
Thanks! It’s particularly convenient that the winner was a trematode person, because I’m much better at cartooning trematodes than other parasite taxa. I swear that didn’t influence my calculations. 😉
You might be interested in this bit of trematode inspired cartoon I drew quite a few years ago: http://the-episiarch.deviantart.com/art/Twenty-three-spines-181233522
And this one, which, while a bit abstract, was actually somewhat inspired by trematodes: http://the-episiarch.deviantart.com/art/Big-Momma-181223734
Sweeeeeeeet.
LOL!
(I was terribly disappointed at the news of the year 2000 not making the present century’s cut however)
I was quite annoyed, because I realized it part way through, and had to go back and re-do the stuff that I had already done. I was going to ignore it, but I have some OCD issues, and I just couldn’t handle it. 😛
Who decides when the century starts, anyways?
Jesus.
Touche.
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