Anthropocentric bias may explain research disparities between animal tool use and nest building (code)

This repository contains R code and data files associated with a published manuscript titled "Anthropocentric bias may explain research disparities between animal tool use and nest building". See below for a description of each file.

tool_nest_language_data_sharing.csv: this is the processed data set that can be used to reproduce all findings reported in the main text and supplementary material. It contains the following columns:

Article.Title: article title.

Abstract: text of article abstract (if available, otherwise NA).

Citations: number of citations per article as recorded in all Web of Science databases.

Behaviour: indicates whether the article is relevant to tool use (Tool) or nest building (Nest).

Great.Ape: indicates whether the article is relevant to the behaviour of great apes (Y) or other taxa (N).

Corvus: indicates whether the article is relevant to the behaviour of Corvus species (Y) or other taxa (N).

JIF: journal impact factor (for the year 2023 or latest available year, if available, otherwise NA).

Subject: subject category (one of: Anthro, Applied, Cognition, Ecology, General, Other_bio, Taxon, Zoology or NA if not available. See main text and supplementary material for further explanation of these categories)

Intel.percent: percentage of words in the article abstract (where available, otherwise NA) that match a custom dictionary of 'intelligent' language (see main text and supplementary material for further explanation).

Alt.percent: percentage of words in the article abstract (where available, otherwise NA) that match an alternative dictionary of 'intelligent' language (see main text and supplementary material for further explanation).

tool_nest_language_data_analysis.R contains the R code used to produce the analyses reported in the main text and supplementary material. For further explanation please see the script annotations.

Text files contained in the Dictionaries folder contain two custom dictionaries used for matching stems from article abstracts. 'custom_dictionary.txt' is the dictionary used for the vast majority of analyses, containing a combination of words (n=61) selected by the authors and included in the Collins online thesauraus, detailed in Table S1. 'alt_dictionary.txt' is an alternative dictionary, containing the word 'intelligent' plus 20 synonyms (n=21) included in the Collins online thesaurus.