Reply to Letter to the Editor: Huang, M., 2022: Comments on "Persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic chemicals in insects: Current state of research and where to from here?". Sci Total Environ. 838, 155624, and Corrigendum.

In our recently published study in Science of the Total Environment, we used a systematic literature search to investigate the current state of research of persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic chemicals (PBTs) and insects. We found a distinct increase of human, animal, and vertebrate publications related to PBTs in the early 1990s but did not identify a conclusive cause for this. In her Letter to the Editor, Huang (2022) offered an explanation for our result, and we have used her initiative to repeat our analysis with refined methodology. We present a corrected version of our original Fig. 1; importantly, though, our main finding, the general underrepresentation of insects in the research of PBTs, has remained the same. We conclude by addressing difficulties such as the reproducibility in literature searches and by discussing consequences of unequal resource distributions in science.