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Data from: Saving bees or sustaining industry? Challenging neoliberal narratives in North American pollinator research and conservation

Fitch, Gordon1; Iuliano, Benjamin2; Vaidya, Chatura3

Published Jun 16, 2026 on Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.80gb5mm56

Data files

Jun 16, 2026 version files 3.46 KB

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Abstract

To explore the growing scientific interest in bees and insect pollinators, in March 2025 we conducted an analysis of bibliometric trends for terms related to pollinator conservation using Google Scholar; these included “pollinator conservation”, “bee conservation”, “butterfly conservation”, and “colony collapse” + “honey bee”. We chose butterflies as a similarly charismatic insect “control” taxon for comparison, an approach which has previously been used to compare public attitudes to various insect taxa. For each term, we tallied the number of results returned for each year from 2000-2024. To assess whether the terms used to refer to pollinators and justify their conservation are linked to such economic rationale, we conducted additional searches and calculated the proportion of search results for each of the terms listed above that also included the term “ecosystem services”. This analysis was conducted to inform a Perspective piece on the pollinator research community.