😎 Whenever your manuscript is rejected by a reputable high-ranked journal due to insufficient scientific approach or the research validity - do not lose hope!
Too many cats 🙀, not enough crustaceans 🦞: The current emoji catalog doesn't accurately represent the breadth of biodiversity seen in nature - and that hurts conservation efforts, according to Italian scientists.
An analysis published in the journal iScience found that while animals are well represented by the current emoji catalog, plants, fungi, and microorganisms get short shrift.
The team assessed emojis related to nature and animals available in Emojipedia, a curated online catalog of emojis, and tracked how these changed between 2015 and 2022.
Among animals, vertebrates (including mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and bony fish) were overrepresented, making up 76% of animal emojis.
Arthropods, including insects, arachnids, crustaceans, were proportionally underrepresented, despite there being 1.3 million described species of arthropod compared to 85,000 known species of vertebrate.
The researchers also noted there were no emojis representing either 🪱 platyhelminths (flatworms, including tapeworms) or nematodes, despite there being more than 20,000 platyhelminth species and almost 20,000 nematode species.
The research was funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research, P.N.R.R., Missione 4 Componente 2, ‘‘Dalla ricerca all’im-presa’’, Investimento 1.4, Project CN00000033. G.F.F. was funded by the European Union – NextGenerationEU, Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (Mission 4, Component 2, Investment 1.5 ‘Innovation Ecosystems’), project MUSA.
👨🔬 The references section contains as many as 42 sources. There is also no doubt that respected emoji researchers were involved in peer review.
🦖🦕 Why the authors did not pay enough attention to the issue of representing dinosaurs emoji remains a mystery. Perhaps this is a topic for future EU-funded research.
iScience is a truly highly rated journal:
📊 Scopus: CiteScore 6.9; SJR 1.62
📊 WoS - SCIE: JCI 1.05
💰 According to the journal website, the publication fee of iScience is around 3150 USD.
Original article link