CHINESE WILDLIFE SCIENCE - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 202

uninformative, particularly when it comes to the crucial issue of sampling. To provide
an illustrative example, what follows is my translation of the entire Methods section
from a recently published technical paper reporting on a long-term study of survival and
fecundity of a large mammal species in western China (I have deliberately deleted the
species and location to avoid disclosing, and thus directly criticizing, the authors: they
did no worse than many others, and the rest of the paper is among the best I have seen
published in China):
Research Methods. Field observations: [The species] in [x province] has a relatively
fixed area of activity. Young less than ten days of age do not follow their mothers but
rather hide in shrubs because their ability to run is rather weak and they can only
travel a short distance. We followed mothers that had recently given birth, and, us-
ing a net, captured young three to ten days after they began suckling. To mark these
young, we placed ear tags in the left ear of males and in the right ear of females.
After marking, young were released at the capture site. We captured thirteen young
[of this species] in 1987 and a total of ninety-eight young [of this species] during
1989-1991. We then followed the fate of each marked young animal, compiling all
of the data at the end of the study, and using statistical analyses, built a life-table. The
maximum rate of increase, r max , is an index that integrates the ability of the popula-
tion to increase under the specific biological conditions facing it. The equation for
calculating it is identical to that for calculating the intrinsic rate of increase, but this
parameter is obtained under these specific natural conditions. Using the accumulated
data for [this species] in [this nature reserve] from February 1987 through April
2004, we calculated death rates, survival rates, age of first reproduction, and age-
specific reproductive rates, allowing us to calculate the maximum rate of increase
for [this species] in [this area] during the entire study period.
If you are unfamiliar with the details of measuring and analyzing survival, reproduction,
and growth rates of wildlife populations, and thus worried that you've missed something
here, rest easy: you haven't. A Methods section such as the above is completely unin-
formative even to a practicing population biologist. Reading such a paper, one has no
idea if all animals observed were captured (or if, alternatively, the captured sample was
perhaps a biased one), if capture might have affected survival, how often animals were
monitored, how the problem of missing animals was treated, how the problem of ear tag
loss was treated, or, indeed, how reproductive rates were estimated. 17 One simply has to
decide whether to take their reported results on faith, or to ignore the paper.
Out of curiosity, I quantified the length of Methods sections from all the papers I had
been sent during 2004-5 by the Chinese mammalogical journal Acta Theriologica Sinica
(and on which I acted as a contributing editor), and compared these results to a similar
exercise done on all the articles published in the 2005 issues of the international (English-
language) journal I edit, Ursus . 18 In Acta , eleven of twenty-one articles had Methods
sections that constituted less than 10 percent of the entire paper; in Ursus , only three of
twenty-three articles had such short Methods sections. In contrast, Methods sections took