Publishing your Results

We stress the importance of making the results of your project available to the wider conservation community. In addition to interim or final reports that you may provide to us or information that you may publish on your webpage, you should, where possible, aim to publish your results in peer-reviewed journals. Information published in this way will then be available to others via mainstream search facilities such as Google Scholar.

If you are undertaking an MSc or PhD, simply including your results in your thesis does not necessarily mean they will be publicly available for all to see. You should consider setting up an account on Research Gate where you can post your publications or other material for others to view and download.

We encourage you to also consider adding your data to open access portals such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility as this would increase the impact of your work and help others who may benefit from the data you collect.

ALL grant recipients should consider publishing results, even if they are of a preliminary nature. Preliminary results can act as an encouragement to generate additional information that will help provide a more complete picture about a particular topic. Preliminary data can also be helpful for informing project development, working hypotheses, etc., for future, perhaps larger projects. This may be particularly true of studies of poorly known threatened species where there may be little or no published data available.

Local journals that are searchable represent an appropriate outlet for preliminary data. In general, all nature conservation studies that are sound scientifically, but with small sample sizes, are valuable and worth publishing, particularly if they are unlikely to be expanded into larger projects.

There are national, regional and international peer-reviewed journals that may be appropriate for publishing your results – examples might be the Raffles Bulletin, Forktail focusing on birds, or Journal of Threatened Taxa. At an international level, Oryx – The International Journal of Conservation has an excellent track record in publishing papers written by in-country scientists. Oryx also has a section for Short Communications, ideal if you feel you do not have sufficient material to warrant a full paper but want to ensure your results are publicised. The website also has two useful manuals on Writing for Conservation and Graphics for Conservation.Likewise, the Conservation Evidence journal publishes tests of conservation interventions, accepts short communications (as little as one A4 page) and is both open access and free to publish in. These are just examples, there are many more.

Effective conservation will almost always have strong science/social science underpinnings that need to be documented rigorously. Using peer-reviewed publications can create the longer-term knowledge base that is critically needed.