Specimen Citations

[Krell]

Dear Diana,

in some "modern" (whatever it means) branches of organismic biology (like
ecology) it has became quite normal to withhold any raw data. That makes most
of their evaluations and interpretations irreproducible. Obviously, saving
printing space is considered more important that one of the fundamentals of
science: reproducibility.
Do not let degenerate taxonomy in the same way! You will certainly find some
journals where you are allowed to include your specimen data. These may not be
the impact factor journals, but we should judge scientific quality of a paper
higher than the impact factor of the journal. I suggest to annex a gazetteer
rather than giving all locality specifications with every specimen.
I hope that the internet may lead to a revival or raw data accessibility.
Journals can (and some do) publish raw data as electronic supplements via the
net, saving printing costs and improving scientific quality).
Cheers

Frank

--
Dr. Frank-Thorsten Krell
Zoologisches Forschunginstitut und
Museum Alexander Koenig
Adenauerallee 160
D-53113 Bonn
Germany
Tel. (inst.) ++49-(0)228-9122276
Tel. (priv.) ++49-(0)228-6440230
Tel. (mobile) ++49-(0)170-3437940
Fax ++49-(0)228-216979
e-mail: ft.krell.zfmk at uni-bonn.de

Diana Horton schrieb:

> I am struggling with the problem of specimen citations.  As was noted
> recently, specimens are the data on which taxonomic research is based, so
> citations of those specimens are critically important.  However, it is a
> time-consuming process to enter specimen data into a spreadsheet/database.
> Recently, it took about six hours to enter data on just over 100 specimens
> (most were fairly quick, but about a third of them were from Europe and I
> had to spend some time trying to decipher foreign languages to determine
> locality).  -- I could annotate a lot of specimens in the time it took me
> to enter those data (and I have a lot waiting to be annotated!), and no
> editor is going to allow publication of all those citations (however, I
> realize a copy could be placed in some library to make them available).
>
> I would be interested to know whether people think that one should keep
> records of *every* specimen one examines.  If not all, how many and how
> does one decide which specimens to record?  As an alternative, would it be
> acceptable just to cite a herbarium/repository acronym and the number of
> specimens annotated, at least for some specimens (obviously, one will have
> to record distributional data in some way even if a detailed specimen
> citation is not kept)?
>
> The info. I include in my specimen citations includes as much as possible
> of the following:
>
> Determination (mine)
> Date Determined
> Country
> Province/State
> County
> lat/long
> Sec/Township/range
> Specific Locality, incl. ecol.
> Collector
> Collection #/Date
> Notes (mine, on the specimen)
> Original determination
> Herbarium Acronym
>
> Diana Horton
> Herbarium and Biological Sciences
> 312 CB
> University of Iowa
> Iowa City, IA  52242-1297
> U.S.A.