Aims. The chemical evolution of galaxies on a cosmological timescale is still a matter of debate despite the increasing number of available data provided by spectroscopic surveys of star-forming galaxies at different redshifts. The fundamental relations involving metallicity, such as the mass − metallicity relation (MZR) or the fundamental metallicity relation, give controversial results about the reality of evolution of the chemical content of galaxies at a given stellar mass. In this work we shed some light on this issue using the completeness reached by the 20 k bright sample of the zCOSMOS survey and using for the first time the nitrogen-to-oxygen ratio (N/O) as a tracer of the gas phase chemical evolution of galaxies that is independent of the star formation rate.
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Pérez‐Montero et al. (2012) studied this question.