This dataset supports an investigation into the publication records of public participation in tropical conservation and environmental management research. It includes information from 453 relevant papers published up through 2020 and identified via Web of Science core collection, processed by the co-authors, and analyzed using R. It also includes preliminary information on relevant papers identified by the same methods from the years 2021-2024. This additional information is meant to facilitate similar research focused on these years, which were quite different from those prior due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Data included in this dataset are associated with the paper titled, "Public participation in tropical conservation and environmental management research: Towards a locally grounded and reflexive practice" and accepted in Biotropica. They include:

• SupplementaryInfo_Data.csv : The dataset used for this study.
• ScriptFigs.R : The R script used to create Figures 1-3.
• SupplementaryInfo_2021-2024Data.csv : Incomplete dataset for search results from 2021-2024. Preliminary analysis on this dataset is included in Section F of the Supplementary Information document associated with Piland et al. This dataset can be the base for another bibliometric review as a comparison with this manuscript.
• Script_2021-2024Data.qmd : The R script used to sample the incomplete dataset for search results from 2021-2024 for the preliminary analysis.
• SupplementaryInfo_2021-2024Sample.csv : 25% sample of “SupplementaryInfo_2021-2024Data.csv.

The dataset covers:

●      Authorship variables: number of authors, first author, institution of first author, the country of the first institution, whether a local institution was included in the author list, and whether the first author’s institution was a local institution to the research.

●      Publication variables: year published, the language the paper was published in, the journal that published the paper, whether the paper was a part of a special issue, and the type of paper it was.

●      Practice of participation variables: categories of people who participated, whether the participation was active or passive (if there was a structure of participation set up for the research, or whether it used data from an existing structure such as eBird), the stage of research at which people participated, whether there was any training mentioned in the paper, and whether social media or mobile applications were used to collect data.

●      Subject matter variables: whether the research was basic or applied science, what the research topic was, and the taxonomy studied, if applicable. For both the research topic and taxonomy variables, we further categorized them.

●      Geography variables: where the research took place in terms of country, political region, ecosystem, and biogeographic region, and whether or not the research took place in an urban area.

●      Funding variables: The first funding institution listed, where the institution is based (country), and the type of funding institution it is.

Data was collected via:

i) Search

Our literature review focused on the peer-reviewed literature published in English and available in the Core Collection of the Institute of Scientific Information (ISI; Thomson Reuters) Web of Science database. Please see figure S1 for a schematic representation of the process described herein. The search included all the papers published online by August 12, 2020, containing the key terms: “Citizen science” OR “Public science” OR “Voluntary science” OR “Volunteer science” OR “Participatory Science” OR “Community science” OR “Community-based science” OR “Crowd-sourced science” OR “Participatory monitoring”  OR “Collaborative monitoring” OR “Community-based monitoring” OR “Voluntary biological monitoring” OR “Voluntary monitoring” OR “Participatory management”  OR “Collaborative management” OR “Collaborative-environmental management”  OR “Community-based management” OR “Public engagement in science” OR “Public participation in scientific research”. These terms were identified a priori in the literature to encompass the terminologies most frequently employed in the field (Conrad & Hilchey 2011; Shirk et al. 2012; Eitzel et al. 2017; Piland et al. 2020). After the initial search, we filtered the research categories: “ecology”, “biodiversity conservation”, “plant sciences'', “marine and freshwater biology”, “zoology”, and “fisheries”. A total of 1,986 articles were identified and processed.

A second identical search was carried out on December 10, 2024, at the request of Biotropica editors. We limited the search to papers published between August 12, 2020, and December 10, 2024. This search resulted in 3,785 articles identified for processing.

ii) Paper processing

We manually identified the papers that did research in tropical and subtropical ecoregions of the globe (total of first search = 661, 33.3%; total of second search = 1,832, 48.4%). For terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems, we included all the research conducted in the Neotropic, Afrotropic, Indomalaya, Australasia and Oceania biogeographic realms (sensu Olson & Dinerstein 2002). For marine ecosystems, we included research conducted in the Tropical Eastern Pacific, Tropical Atlantic, Western Indo-Pacific, Central Indo-Pacific, and Eastern Indo-Pacific marine ecoregions (sensu Spalding et al. 2007).

Broad literature reviews, synthesis or insights that do not focus specifically on the tropics or subtropics were not included. The same applies to analytical tools like apps, models and software that are not designed specifically for a tropical or subtropical region, or do not explore a tropical or subtropical case study. During the processing, we also excluded the papers that just mention citizen science or community-based management as recommendations or as future goals, instead of being an actual contribution based on citizen science or community-based efforts already in place. We also excluded papers in which community members and/or participants were the subject of the research rather than participants in the research process, papers in which volunteers were incorporated on an ad hoc basis rather than as an intentional part of the research process, where participants were part of graduate level courses, and where participants were paid. This process left us with 414 papers from the first search (20.9% of search results, 62.6% of tropical papers) and 1,015 papers from the second search (26.8% of results, 55.4% of tropical papers). We furthered limited the second search results to those papers published through 2020 to limit the effect of potential influence from the COVID-19 pandemic and to adapt to our research team’s current capacity. This resulted in a dataset for the main publication that included 453 papers. The incompletely processed 2021-2024 dataset (958 papers) is described in Section F of the Supplementary Information document associated with this manuscript.

While processing papers for the bibliometric analysis, we realized that some publications (15 total) report results for more than one research investigation, which can be quite different in scope, research topic/location, approach, and type of public participation. Therefore, we opted to focus our analysis on the “research activities” described in the 453 papers, which we define here as the independent research investigations reported in each paper. We refer by “independent” the investigations applying completely different research methods and involving a unique set of public participation, which generally also focused on distinct ecosystems, locations, and taxonomic groups. For instance, Liebenberg et al. (2017) report the use of handheld computers with the software CyberTracker from two independent case studies monitoring large mammals, one conducted in Australia and another one in South Africa. Similarly, Matose & Watts (2010) present three independent case studies about timber harvesting and community-based forest management in Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and South Africa. These examples illustrate the existing papers reporting more than one research activity that were accounted as independent sampling units in our data compilation. 

 A total of 484 research activities emerged from the 453 research papers selected for further examination in the bibliometric analysis. Resulting research activities were assessed for variables relating to authorship, publication, terminology, practice of participation, subject matter, geography, and funding.

We also took additional notes from papers regarding the strategies taken for outreach of participants, the benefits to participants and to science identified, type of data collected, and other comments of interest. As authorship, publication and funding variables refer to the papers rather than the independent research activities, they were replicated across the activities reported in the same paper. The final dataset was then explored to produce the descriptive stats and visualizations presented in Section 3 (“Main trends in published literature”) of the associated manuscript.