Between species differences in research effort can lead to biases in our global view of evolution, ecology and conservation. The increase in meta-taxonomic comparative analyses on birds underlines the need to better address how research effort is distributed in this class. Methods have been developed to choose which species should be studied to obtain unbiased comparative data sets, but a precise and global knowledge of research effort is required to be able to properly apply them. We address this issue by providing a data set of research effort (number of papers from 1978 to 2008 in the Zoological Record database) estimates for the 10 064 species of birds. We then test whether research effort is associated with phylogeny, geography and eleven different life history and ecological traits. We show that phylogeny accounts for a large proportion of the variance, while geographic range and all the tested traits are also significant contributors to research effort variance. We identify avian taxa that are under- and overstudied and address the importance of research effort biases in evaluating vulnerability to extinction, with non-threatened species studied twice as much as threatened ones. Our research effort data set covering the entire class Aves provides a tool for researchers to incorporate this potential confounding variable in comparative analyses.