Data from: Building on 150 years of knowledge: the freshwater isopod Asellus aquaticus as an integrative eco-evolutionary model system

Introduction

This is a literature database with reference information of all papers that use the freshwater isopod Asellus aquaticus; published between the years 1867 and 2020. This database is intended as a starting point for scientists interested in conducting research on and with this organism. The database is currently only available as a single CSV file; future versions may be made available through a more frequently updated SQL database. The database includes specific information about the subject area and content of each paper, as well as bibliographic information. This repository is associated with the paper "Building on 150 years of knowledge: the freshwater isopod Asellus aquaticus as an integrative eco-evolutionary model system", published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

Details on Methods from the electronic supplement:

We used the we online search tools of Web of Science (WOS; Clarivate analytics) by searching for the term "asellus aquaticus" in six relevant databases (BIOSIS, CABI, FSTA, Medline, WOS Core Collection and Zoological Records). The database was accessed with a University License (Lund University). We manually downloaded the results and combined them to a single CSV file in Excel (Microsoft). All further processing was done in the statistical programming language R, version 4.0.2 (R Core Team 2020).

From the 1238 obtained records we discarded three papers that were published after the year 2020 to work with completed years only. We used the subject areas assigned by WOS to provide an overview of the fields of science in which A. aquaticus has been most studied. Each paper had between one and ten subject areas assigned by WOS (2845 assignments to 1235 papers, meaning 2.3 assignments per paper, on average). To represent these multiple assignments in relation to the actual number of papers per year, we calculated "fractional assignments" by adding up all assignments to a field per year, divided by the total number of assignments in that year, and then multiplied by the number of papers.  For example, if there were 12 assignments to "toxicology" in 1993, and 133 assignments in 1993, but only 21 papers published, "toxicology" would get a score of 1.9 papers in 1993 (as calculated by = (12/133)*21). In Figure 1, we represent these "fractional assignments" in the top panel, and the total number of assignments in the lower panel.

Caption for figure (1) in publication:

FIGURE 1 | Over 150 years of research on and with Asellus aquaticus. The figure summarizes published scientific literature on A. aquaticus. We conducted a quantitative literature survey with the search tools of Web of Science (WOS; Clarivate analytics) by searching for the term "asellus aquaticus" in six databases (i.e., BIOSIS, CABI, FSTA, Medline, WOS Core Collection, and Zoological Records). We found 1235 records, published between 1867 and 2020. (A) The graph shows the number of publications per year within a given subject area, as designated by WOS. (B) The graph shows the total number of publications assigned to a specific subject area. The top 10 fields account for 72.58% of all publications, and are indicated by color coding in A and B (multiple assignments are possible, summing up to 2845 assignments). The inset in B shows a wordcloud with the 100 most used keywords from all A. aquaticus’ publications. Furthermore, we compiled all records with relevant information (e.g., title, keywords, research areas, and abstract) to a single file which is available online. More details can be found in the Supplementary Material.