Botanical insecticide research: many publications, limited useful data

• Botanical insecticides research has grown dramatically in recent years.
• However, most articles lack chemical characterization and positive controls.
• These deficiencies limit their use for discovery of effective botanical insecticides.
• India, China, and Brazil accounted for >40% of the 1207 papers published in 2012 on this topic.

Our analysis of >20 000 papers on botanical insecticides from 1980 to 2012, indicates major growth in the number of papers published annually (61 in 1980 to 1207 in 2012), and their proportion among all papers on insecticides (1.43% in 1980 to 21.38% in 2012). However, only one-third of 197 random articles among the 1086 papers on botanical insecticides published in 2011 included any chemical data or characterization; and only a quarter of them included positive controls. Therefore, a substantial portion of recently published studies has design flaws that limit reproducibility and comparisons with other and/or future studies. In our opinion, much of the scientific literature on this subject is of limited use in the progress toward commercialization or advancement of knowledge, given the resources expended.