Potential effects of oil and gas development on pollinating insects in the western United States: An annotated bibliography produced through a structured literature search and semi-automated content analysis

This data release contains the citation details, abstracts, and expert annotations of 235 publications on the topic of the potential effects of oil and gas development on pollinating insects in the western United States. Publications were collected through a structured literature search and a semi-automated content analysis. We developed a search string designed to pull relevant papers from Scopus and Web of Science. We used a set of benchmark publications identified by experts that were known to be relevant to the topic to refine the search string. The search returned 1,435 unique publications. Text mining of the title, abstract, and keywords quantified the relevancy of each paper to the topic and was used to discard the least relevant papers. We divided the remaining 731 publications into ten disturbance-based categories. The publications went through a three-step review process to remove irrelevant papers and to annotate relevant papers with key information related to the disturbance category. Lastly, text mining of the full manuscripts using the KWICer R code (Bailey and others 2026) was used to count the number of mentions of key words and phrases related to disturbance type, pollinator taxa, effect on pollinators, geographic location, ecosystem type, and study methodology. The annotated bibliography contains 235 unique publications across the 10 disturbances categories: Air and chemical pollution (87 publications), air turbulence (4), dust (6), habitat loss and fragmentation (23), invasive plants (52), light pollution (37), noise pollution (6), oil and gas (7), roads (38), and soil compaction and trampling (10). The publications date from 1992 to 2026 and are mostly scientific articles (220) with some review papers (13), one editorial material, and one brief report. Full-manuscript text mining results are summarized in a set of figures that show the publication year, ecosystem type, and geographic area, as well as matrices that show the frequency and co-occurrence of pollinator taxa, disturbance type, and effect on pollinators in the body of literature. Together with the annotated bibliography, these elements provide key information that can help streamline regulatory processes related to oil and gas development on public lands. Bailey, L.N., Varner, D.M., Whipple, S.E., 2026, KWICer: Producing an annotated bibliography from a set of PDFs by quantifying keywords, (Version 1.0.0): U.S. Geological Survey software release, https://doi.org/10.5066/P1476GUY.