The 111 selected papers were published in 36 different journals with a broad focus on ecology and molecular ecology. There has been a steady increase in the number of papers published in this domain over time (Fig. 1). The earliest year of publication was 2011, but 77% of all papers were published in the last four years (2017-2020, n = 86, Fig. 1). Almost all papers studied invertebrate communities (n=108). Forty-five papers were focussed on terrestrial communities, 31 on freshwater, 30 on marine and five on parasite communities collected from a host vertebrate (see Table S2 for all the details on the core papers set).