Toxic Habits: An Analysis of General Trends and Biases in Snake Venom Research.

ABSTRACT: Biases in snake venom research have been partially identified but seldomly quantified. Using the Google Scholar web search engine, we collected a total of 267 articles published between 1964 and 2021, and reviewed them to assess the main trends in this field of study. We developed a 4-category classification of the harmful potential of each of the 298 snake species retrieved from the analysed publications, and tested whether taxonomy, realm of origin, and/or assigned hazard category could affect how often each of them appeared in the articles considered. Overall, viperids were significantly more represented than any other snake taxon retrieved. The Neotropics were the most represented biogeographic realm for number of studied species, whereas information about the country of origin of the

SUBMITTER: Avella I 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9783912 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature