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

SummaryMycologists often lament a relative lack of attention to fungi, a species-rich yet under-recognized group of organisms. Is this situation getting any better? Over the last two decades, there has been a general increase in the proportion of papers mentioning fungi for studies indexed in Web of Science. Depending on the associated keyword, the percentage of ‘fungal’ papers varies among 0.3 % (networks) and 8 % (pathogens), and the rate of increase is between 0.06 % (disease and health) and 1.5 % (grasslands) per decade. Fungi are sometimes less often mentioned than insects (e.g. in the agriculture and climate change literature), but the representation is similar for biological, environmental, genetic, fruit, new species and network papers, and fungi are more often dealt with than insects in the soil, marine, molecular, seed, food, wood and epidemiological literature. The representation of fungi has been catching up with that of insects in papers on ecology, biodiversity, species richness, biology, biogeography, mountains, forests and grasslands, whereas insects are becoming more often mentioned than fungi in papers on landscape and freshwater systems.