Conservation research is essential to help inform the science-based management of environments that support threatened and endangered wildlife; however, research effort is not necessarily uniform across countries globally. Here, we assessed how the research importance of conservation is distributed globally across different countries and what drives this variation. Specifically, we compared the number of conservation/ecological articles versus all scientific articles published for each country in relation to the number of endangered species, the protection status and number of ecosystems, and the economic status of each country (gross domestic product (GDP) per capita). We observed a significant and positive relationship between the proportion of conservation and ecology articles to all scientific articles with respect to the number of endangered species and the proportion of endangered species that are protected in a country, as well as GDP per capita. In conclusion, knowledge about the conservation and economic status of countries should be accounted for when predicting the research importance of conservation and ecology.
Keywords: Biodiversity; Conservation; Conservation biology; Ecosystem management; Endangered species; Publication; Research activity; Scientometric analysis.