Bottle or Big‐Scale Studies: How do we do Ecology?

While other articles in this Special Feature address the pros and cons of microcosm "bottle" experiments in ecology, the purpose of our article is to characterize the use and influence of microcosm experiments within one arbitrarily chosen field of ecology, the study of interactions among two or more species. We do this by asking four questions: (1) How common are microcosm experiments in the published literature? (2) Do microcosm experiments differ from other types of speciesinteraction studies either in the number of included species or in duration? (3) How influential are microcosm experiments as revealed by the number of citations they garner in the Science Citation Index? and (4) How influential are microcosm experiments as measured by their inclusion in undergraduate ecology textbooks? To answer these questions, we conducted a survey of ecological journals and textbooks. Our choices of journals and textbooks were to some degree capricious. However, even though our results may depend on these choices, the chosen journals and textbooks are certainly representative of the basic reading for most ecologists.