Flawed citation practices facilitates the unsubstantiated perception of a global trend toward increased jellyfish blooms [Dataset]

This data set compiles 159 papers that contain statements about jellyfish population trends or papers used to support these statements, from all available papers (n=225) published on jellyfish ecology between 1987 and April 2012 (prior to Brotz et al., 2012, the first global analysis of jellyfish populations). All these papers were collated through an exhaustive search on Google Scholar (GS) and Web of Knowledge (WOK). The search terms used were: “jellyfish” or “jellyfish blooms” or “ctenophore” or “gelatinous zooplankton”; “population” or “abundance” or “distribution”; “change” or “trend”; “increase” or “increasing” or “rise” or “rising”; “global” or “worldwide” or “regional” or “region”. Papers making statements that referenced other sources were defined as ‘citing papers’ and papers used to support these statements were ‘cited papers’ (continue reading the file Sanz-Martínetal_Dataset_Details.pdf).This dataset compiles 159 papers that contain statements about jellyfish population trends or papers used to support these statements. Statements of the citing papers were classified into spatial categories and degrees of affirmation. Each citation has been evaluated adapting the method proposed by Todd et al. (2007). A network of citation has been produced (see Fig. 1) and the resulting specific properties of every paper (or node) are detailed in the dataset.N