ECOLOG ‐L's Function in the Ecological Community

Abstract

I started the ECOLOG-L Listserv list at the University of Maryland in 1992 as a way for ecologists to exchange information about career opportunities, jobs, meetings, resources, and interesting topics for discussion. Although it took a few years for the subscriber base to grow significantly, it then went through an exponential growth phase and, currently, has over 19,000 subscribed addresses from at least 60 countries (Fig. 1). There are no data on how career stage correlates with membership in the list, but anecdotally I know that only a small proportion of the Governing Board of the Ecological Society (mostly mid- to senior-level ecologists) subscribe. I suspect that many of the subscribers who are undergraduates learn about ECOLOG-L from faculty members or advisors who suggest they subscribe to learn about opportunities for summer jobs or graduate training. Probably, graduate students subscribe to learn about postdoc and faculty positions. Anecdotally, I have heard that some ecologists have made use of the list for multiple stages of their careers, from undergraduate opportunities, graduate position, postdoc, and faculty positions. Its role in the ecological community has been recognized by a presentation at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America (Weis and Inouye 2013, Reiners et al. 2014). During its history, a couple of trends have emerged. First, it has become the primary venue for advertising educational and employment opportunities for ecologists at all career stages, from undergraduate to faculty or non-academic positions. An unintended consequence of this growth is a decline in the advertising revenue for Ecological Society of America's publications where faculty positions, in particular, were advertised more commonly in the past. There are no data, but my suspicion is that opportunities, such as Research Experience for Undergraduates, and summer employment as research technicians, are more widely accessible now than they were before ECOLOG-L became an important venue for advertising. A second change is that there is less use of the list for discussions of interesting facts, papers, or questions. There are still regular requests for advice about techniques, but even in that case, many of the responses are directed to individuals rather than the whole list. My guess is that people are more inhibited about posting speculative queries or topics outside their expertise when the subscriber base is so large. I know that when I have sometimes posted queries or topics of interest that perhaps 90% of the responses are directed to me individually rather than the list. I have often posted (anonymized) summaries of responses when I think the results would be of general interest, and some others have done the same. The searchable archive of messages facilitates retrieval of this information. The list is moderated, which means that I have to approve all messages before they are posted. Very few inappropriate messages are submitted, although I have had a few vitriolic messages sent to me when I decided not to approve a posting I decided was not appropriate. As list owner, I also respond to queries for help in subscribing or unsubscribing, posting messages, and receive copies of error messages. Use of the list is substantial, with sometimes 25+ messages/day being posted. For five recent months, numbers of posts ranged from 243 in June 2017, to 370 (September and November 2017), to 475 (January 2018) (Table 1B). That equates to over 8 million messages being sent out some months to subscribers (thanks to the University of Maryland for providing the software and servers for accomplishing this). Because all the messages posted are archived at the University of Maryland, it is possible to access and categorize them. Table 1 summarizes for five months the major categories of message types posted on the list. The most common category is advertising of non-academic jobs (e.g., summer or other temporary positions, NGO or government jobs), then Ph.D. opportunities, followed by postdocs, academic faculty positions, courses/workshops, announcements, meetings, Masters degree opportunities, requests for advice or information, internships, and REU opportunities. Roughly equal numbers of posts concern grants, research assistantships, awards/scholarships, and general discussion. My results do not incorporate a whole year of messages, so undoubtedly they miss some of the temporal patterning in academic advertising, such as opportunities for graduate school positions, summer jobs or internships, openings for Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU), and faculty positions. Table 1A shows a peak in Ph.D. opportunity advertisements in November, and a peak for REU advertisements in January, for example. I wondered how successful these messages are in generating responses. It is possible to quantify responses by using a (free) feature of Bitly.com, which will generate a short URL which can then be used to count responses to the URL. In February and March 2018 at my request subscribers incorporated Bitly links into 96 posts on the list, including a variety of types of posts. This has facilitated some insights into how successful they are in generating responses, as well as the time-course and country of origin of those responses (This is accomplished by typing in the Bitly URL with a + sign at the end of the URL.). The 14 posts advertising internships or research assistantships averaged 242 responses (i.e., clicking on the URL for more information), from up to 34 different countries (details in Table 2). Six advertisements for REU opportunities averaged 225 responses, from 7 to 18 countries. Five advertisements for M.S. or Ph.D. students averaged 339 responses from a mean of 22 countries. Postdoc advertisements (N = 11) had an average of 293 responses from 20 countries, and 12 faculty positions averaged 370 responses from 15 countries. Announcements about courses had a mean of 284 responses from nine countries, jobs (mostly non-academic, one volunteer) averaged 291 responses from 13 countries, while general announcements (e.g., meetings, Webinars, surveys, fellowships) averaged 291 responses from 14 countries. Although most of the responses came from subscribers reading the messages in their e-mail programs, some came from forwarded or re-posted copies of the original messages. Within a category of announcement, there can be significant variation in the number of responses; for example, posts about REU opportunities received a range of 69–480 responses. A typical temporal pattern of response is that the great majority come the same day that a message is posted, with another group the next day (probably many from subscribers reading the daily digest that was sent to them at midnight). There is also a long, small tail to the temporal distribution. The Ecological Society of America anticipates taking over the list later this summer. There have been suggestions over the years to create a more focused subset of postings, such as just those for jobs, and ESA might decide to pursue that. In any case, it has been an interesting experience to foster and supervise this list over the decades. The University of Maryland has hosted the ECOLOG-L list since its inception. Some list subscribers cooperated by creating Bitly URLs to facilitate this study. Administering this list has been a Broader Impact for research grants from the National Science Foundation, including DEB-1354104.