Masters Dissertation Example

6.4.2 Inaccessible research and information gaps 
 
Two of the issues raised by conservation practitioners in discussions about the role of the 
scientific literature in species conservation were the missing gap between ‘high level’ science 
and extremely applied conservation research, and the bias towards positive results (section 
5.1.1). It was a general concern that results of conservation action were not being reported 
because they were not quite of peer-review quality, and that intuition and ideas were not 
readily incorporated into the scientific literature. Indeed, an analysis of the success of tiger 
conservation projects suggested that the most crucial information was of little interest to 
academic journals (Gratwicke et al, 2007). Practitioners also felt that there was a wealth of 
knowledge available locally in journals, grey literature and unpublished reports that was 
currently inaccessible internationally, an assertion supported by Fazey et al (2005), Meijaard 
& Shiel (2007), and Dudgeon (2003). This information does not reach scientific journals due 
to lack of capacity (discussed in section 6.3), time conflicts (Fleishman et al, 1999) and 
language and financial barriers (Dudgeon, 2003).
Peer review evidently plays a role in keeping scientific research at a high quality (Smallwood 
et al, 2000), and although ‘lower impact’ research with a sound scientific basis and 
documentation of conservation failures should play a large role in this, it is difficult to 
envisage the incorporation of more qualitative or intuitive research without compromising the 
standard. However, it is also clear that there is a lot of relevant information that is not being 
published and there is currently no adequate forum for its dissemination. Although this issue is 
being increasingly recognised in conservation research (Sutherland et al, 2004, Pullin & 
Knight, 2005), it is clear that conservation could benefit from this information becoming more 
accessible internationally, particularly in an adaptive management framework, although a 
website with this purpose is being developed (Conservation Evidence, 2007). 

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Whilst this study did not adequately incorporate research reporting outcomes of conservation 
action, the views of practitioners, along with analysis by Fazey et al (2004) suggests this is 
lacking in the scientific literature, and needs to gain more prominence (Stem et al, 2005; 
Salafsky et al, 2002; Kleiman et al, 2000), particularly as this is valuable information that 
needs to be available to the wider conservation community.