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Editorial: Developments in biogeography

This issue marks the onset of the fifth decade of the Journal of Biogeography. The first issue was published in March 1974 under the editorship of David Watts, with John Flenley and Daniel Simberloff acting as associate editors. The journal was then a slim, sub-A4-sized publication appearing in four issues a year and including an eclectic mix of papers from study systems around the globe and featuring various short notes as well as a staple and valued diet of book reviews. It is interesting to reflect on the developments in the subject across the 40-year span that has elapsed since that first issue, as recorded in what has become a leading forum for biogeographical research and thinking. Equally interesting, to me at least, are the accompanying transitions in the nature of scientific papers and of ‘publications’ themselves and how they are communicated, disseminated and curated. The growth of a journal reflects various supply and demand constraints as well as changing editorial policy, and should not be assumed to reflect subject growth in a simple fashion. Nonetheless, it is worth recording the increase in the number of articles published in the journal (Fig. 1) and noting that under Philip Stott’s editorship (from mid-1987 to mid-2004) the journal not only switched to the larger A4 format (1989) but also launched two sister publications as part of the same subscription (Stott, 2004). These journals, Global Ecology and Biogeography (launched in 1991 as Global Ecology and Biogeography Letters) and Diversity and Distributions (launched in 1993 as Biodiversity Letters) are both now recognized as leading journals in the field. Overall, these developments represent a huge increase in volume and I believe do reflect a substantial growth in biogeographical research globally over this period. The recent pause in the upward trend in the number of papers published in the Journal of Biogeography (Fig. 1) belies an underlying increase in content through the introduction about 10 years ago of online Supporting Information. The volume of this supplementary content has steadily increased, and currently over 80% of articles (and nearly all standard research papers) include online appendices. Browsing articles from the earlier years of the journal it is relatively commonplace to find data sets published within the article, whereas currently such material (which can be voluminous), along with GenBank numbers and voucher specimen data, is far more likely to be found in the online Supporting Information or in other data repositories. Supporting Information is readily available to all users of the journal but the content is not searchable via the web, nor is it crossreferenced in the same way as the main body of the paper. The growth of this content and the difficulties experienced by authors in keeping papers to within our guidelines on article length reflects the increasing size and complexity of both data sets and analyses in biogeography.