Fungal under-representation is (indeed) diminishing in the life sciences

A commentary in Fungal Ecology (Pautasso 2013) reported a significant (although shallow) increase through time in the proportion of papers mentioning fungi for 25 out of 30 keywords (ranging, e.g., from ecology to mountain, from agriculture to disease). Dam (2013) complains in his commentary about the rounding-off of the parameter estimates in the scatterplots of Pautasso (2013) and suggests the use of relative years. When repeating the analyses starting to count years from 1990, the regression lines have exactly the same p values, r squares and slopes. Dam (2013) also offers an alternative explanation for the decrease in fungal under-representation in terms of increased use of diverse keywords by researchers, potentially due to the increased importance of the h-index in evaluating scientists. One problem with this explanation is that the h-index was invented in 2005, whereas the observed decrease in fungal under-representation has occurred gradually over the period 1991-2010. Additional evidence provided here confirms the decrease in the under-representation of fungi, because 'fungal' papers have increased in proportion over the last years for the literature mentioning antibiotics, endophytes, pharmacology, patents, old-growth, humans, taxonomy, phylogeny, evolution, biochemistry, chemistry, nanotechnology, cells, microbes, meta-analysis, bioinformatics, biomaterials, biotechnology, long-term, boreal, tropical, Mediterranean and gardens.