Government work and is in the public domain in the USA. We did not detect a decline in negligent reporting over time ≥1 key methodological detail was missing from >50% of studies regardless of the decade published. Studies published in wildlife journals tended to use pitfall traps of larger diameters than studies published in other disciplines these studies also had worse rates of methodological reporting than those in entomology journals. We found only minor differences in the pitfall-trap methods most commonly used in different vegetation communities (e.g., preservative was used less frequently for pitfall trap studies in grasslands). Pitfall-trap methods varied greatly across the time period. We documented the pitfall-trap methods of 257 studies published between January 1994 and March 2016 in 107 scientific journals. We conducted a literature review to identify the most common methods used by past investigators who placed pitfall traps for the purpose of quantifying indices of arthropod abundances, and used this information to guide our proposal for standardized pitfall trapping methods. Such variation and lack of standardization limits scientists’ abilities to compare their results with others. Pitfall trap methodologies and designs vary considerably among studies and investigators. Pitfall traps are commonly used in diet studies for insectivorous and omnivorous wildlife.

Tv tropes pitfall trap