[Taxacom] Periodical and book list

Wed Jan 17 12:06:03 CST 2007

Dear Roger,

Regarding periodicals I take it that you want GUIDs for publications  
(i.e., the journal), not individual articles. The obvious GUID is ISSN,  
which could probably be obtained for a lot of journals by screen  
scraping HTML and URLs (for example, several journal web sites use SICI  
identifiers for articles, which embed ISSN's as part of the  
identifiers). In the same way, one could pull out a bunch of PubMed XML  
records (doing a search on "new species", for example) and associate  
journal names with ISSNs.

Regarding alternative variants of journal names, anybody who has a  
EndNote or Reference Manager library on their computer is likely to  
have a collection of journal names and abbreviations. These could  
easily be used to populate a database.

One large source which springs to mind is the FORMIS ant bibliograpy,  
available as EndNote files  
(http://www.ars.usda.gov/research/docs.htm?docid=10003&page=3), and  
which has over 2000 journal names, most with long and short names. Here  
are some sample records:

Bull. Agric. Congo Belge	Bulletin Agricole du Congo Belge
Bull. Am. Mus. Nat. Hist.	Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural  
History
Bull. Ann. Soc. Entomol. Belg.	Bulletin et Annales de la Société  
Entomologique de Belgique (Bruxelles)
Bull. Ann. Soc. Entomol. Fr.	Bull. Ann. Soc. Entomol. Fr.
Bull. Ann. Soc. R. Entomol. Belg.	Bulletin et Annales de la Société  
Royale Entomologique de Belgique (Bruxelles)

There are also tools for extracting bibliographic details from  
citations (see  
http://ispecies.blogspot.com/2006/01/automatic-extraction-of- 
references.html).

Regards

Rod

On 17 Jan 2007, at 12:41, Roger Hyam wrote:

> I am interested in conducting a social experiment.
>
> It would be very useful when combining taxonomic data from multiple
> databases if there were  globally unique identifiers for major
> taxonomic publications (periodicals/serials and books). One could
> then supplement a reference citation like
>
> Edinb.J. Bot. 47(2): 89-200 (1990)
>
> with an LSID and/or a URL that will tell the user that
>
> Edinb. J. Bot. is the Edinburgh Journal of Botany published by HMSO
> in Edinburgh. It may also give other alias' it is known by and a note
> might say that it is a continuation of Notes from the Royal Botanic
> Garden Edinburgh.
>
> It would enable the user to merge the data with people who have used
> other abbreviations for the same publication title - possibly without
> human interaction.
>
> Lookup services could be created that went from abbreviation to full
> journal title.
>
> The trouble is that the major lists of publications (e.g. BPH, TL2
> etc) are either:
>
> -  are not available electronically.
> -  are available on a subscription basis.
> -  are hopelessly out of date.
> -  can not be added to instantly (if the one you want to use isn't
> cited).
> -  are not freely distributable (i.e. you can't download the whole
> lot and use them as a lookup table in your database or re-distribute
> them as part of a product or archive them to keep you data safe)
>
> I am thinking that this is an ideal test case to see if the
> 'community' could build a freely distributable list that helps us
> all. The list would:
>
> - only include 'top level' publications i.e. periodicals, books,
> multi volume works. It is assumed that it is relatively easy to
> unambiguously identify a location within such publications via
> volume, part, and page/plate numbers.
> - contain a simple set of fields for each publication.
> - would be entirely freely distributable. i.e. a complete copy could
> be downloaded under a LGPL or creative commons type license.
> - contributors would be acknowledged in a contributors list, but
> nothing more.
> - users could comment on entries and submit new entries in real time.
> - would be a key into/integrate with current and future digitization
> efforts.
>
> I have three questions:
>
> 1) Has it already been done?
>
> 2) If this system were available now and populated with the majority
> of publications would you use it? Would it be useful?
>
> 3) Do you (or some one you know) have a database containing details
> of titles of periodicals or books that you could export data from as
> a contribution to seed the list? If so how many records would there
> be and what subject areas (within biodiversity studies) would they
> cover?
>
> You can mail me off list if you don't want to commit to anything in
> front of everyone.
>
> This is still a thought experiment at the moment. I'll mail a high
> level summary of replies I get back to the list.
>
> All the best,
>
> Roger Hyam
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Taxacom mailing list
> Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
> http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/mailman/listinfo/taxacom
>
>
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Professor Roderic D. M. Page
Editor, Systematic Biology
DEEB, IBLS
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