Replication data for: Pull the plug on “dark taxa”: Uncritical knowledge creation in a complicit academy

The term "dark taxa," is harmful, unnecessary, and reinforces the discipline's racist and exclusionary legacy instead of correcting it. To encourage authors, reviewers, and mentors in Biodiversity Sciences and other academic enterprises to avoid and reject terms like “dark taxa” and embrace neutral ones, already available and in use in all hemispheres, such as "cryptic diversity” and “cryptic species” instead we conducted citation analyses to demonstrate how the trend has emerged and where.

We conducted citation analyses for the terms “dark taxa”, “provisional species” or “unknown species”, “undescribed species”, “cryptic species” or (in the plural) “cryptic diversity”. In the first instance, we used the Clarivate™ (Web of Science™) (© Clarivate 2025) to search for these terms by year and record the number of citations (and the total number of publications recorded by the database for that year). Using the ggplot2 package in R and RStudio, we scaled these trends to plot the novel term “dark taxa” and the accepted terms on the same plots.