Readme fileA — Sutherland et al. 2021 — American Journal of Botany This is a comma delimited file (.csv) which contains frequency of Google Ngrams for a number of different terms related to invasion biology from 1958 to 2018. Methods An n-gram is a contiguous string of n items from a sample of text or speech. These items can be letters, syllables, whole words, etc., and typically are searched for within a defined corpus, or database of spoken or written works. To estimate the cultural importance of invasion biology and related fields within English-speaking countries, we used the Google Ngram Viewer tool (https://books.google.com/ngrams) to search for nine words and phrases related to invasion biology. As of release of the 2019 English corpus, Google has digitized and made searchable approximately 30 million books, with over 155 billion words searchable in the American English corpus. To retain all search results, we searched using the ‘ngramr’ version 1.7.2 R package rather than using the Google web interface. Each of the ten searches was run with the following parameters: - Start year 1900 (The database goes back to 1800, but little observable change was found in any term prior to 1900) - End year 2019 (This is the most recent year available) - Case-insensitive (This ignores capitalization at the beginning of a word or phrase, so position within a sentence does not bias results) - Smoothing off (This returns values for each year within the database) Each row of this spreadsheet represents an individual year except for the first row header. Every value represents the relative frequency of the search term in that year. Questions? Please contact Nic Kooyers (nkooyers@gmail.com) or Brittany Sutherland (blsutherland@gmail.com). Column A — Year — the year each google ngram search examined Column B — invplantfreq — relative frequency of the term ‘invasive plant’ Column C — exoplantsfreq — relative frequency of the term ‘exotic plant’ Column D — forplantfreq — relative frequency of the term ‘foreign plant’ Column E — weedplantfreq — relative frequency of the term ‘weedy plant’ Column F — invspeciesfreq — relative frequency of the term ‘invasive species’ Column G — ecospeciesfreq — relative frequency of the term ‘exotic species’ Column H — forspeciesfreq — relative frequency of the term ‘ foreign species’ Column I — invinsectsfreq — relative frequency of the term ‘invasive insect’ Column J — invanimalfreq — summed relative frequencies for the terms ‘invasive insects’, ‘invasive animals’, ‘invasive fish’, ‘invasive birds’, ‘invasive amphibians’, and ‘invasive mammals’. Column K — weedsfreq — relative frequency of the term ‘weeds’