In a new article in Biological Conservation, Jedediah Brodie uses a thorough review of published research papers to highlight some of the imbalances in wild cat research. Brodie tallied the number of published papers by species (using both "all published papers" and "in-situ papers" as subgroups) and compared these numbers to various species characteristics including body mass, geographic range, and threat rank. He demonstrates that while overall research effort appears strongly correlated with body size, "neither geographical range size nor threat status significantly affect the allocation of research effort"--even though these characteristics are widely regarded as objective indicators of extinction risk.

The article can be accessed at: http://www.springerlink.com.floyd.lib.umn.edu/content/3323g8834n675200/