Recently, a reviewer of one of my manuscripts requested that I change the term “pollinator insects” to “insect pollinators” throughout the manuscript, because the latter was the usual term found in the literature.

I’ve nearly always used “pollinator insects” in my publications, partly from habit because one of my PhD supervisors once told me that was correct usage, and partly because “insect pollinators” sounded ambiguous to me – was I talking about insects that pollinate things, or about other organisms that pollinate insects? But this was the first time I had been specifically requested to change my phrasing to conform to apparently common usage.

The reviewer is right. Search any journal database or linguistic corpora, and you will get many more hits for “insect pollinators” than you will for “pollinator insects”. Usage of “insect pollinators” also goes back further than the alternative (Scopus results: 1933 for “IP” and 1991 for “PI”). Even the reliable source Google Trends doesn’t register any interest at all for “pollinator insects”!

Yet grammatically, both terms are correct and choosing one would depend on how you were using it. Continue reading →