Data set that was used to determine the frequency each of 4 key words (public engagement, education, outreach, or science communication) in the title or abstract of published papers in Freshwater Science (formerly the Journal of the North American Benthological Society) and oral presentations (talks) at the annual Society for Freshwater Science meetings from 1997 to 2019. Does not include any data on talks for 2013-2014 because they were not published during those years.

The dataset was collected by reviewing abstracts in the journal Freshwater Science (formerly the Journal of North American Benthological Society [JNABS]) from 1997 to 2019 as well as searching abstracts from oral presentations at the SFS Annual Meeting (available online for 1997–2012 and 2015–2019 at https://sfsannualmeeting.org/SearchAll.cfm) for key words (public engagement, science communication, education, outreach) related to PES. The dataset was processed by inputting the data collected from our search (i.e., year, type of work, keyword, and number of times the keyword appeared in that type of work during the specified year) into a .csv file using Microsoft Excel. R was used (https://www.r-project.org/) and its accompanying package ggplot2 (https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/) to plot the data.