[Taxacom] Open review as a wiki

[Neal Evenhuis]

At 1:15 AM -1000 4/3/08, Richard Pyle wrote:
>One very simple thing we can all do is include within the bibliographies of
>our publications the full citations for the original descriptions of all
>names included anywhere in the article (including genera).  It should soon
>become easier and easier to track these citations down, as various online
>resources get going (already is easy for those lucky groups with roubust
>nomenclators).

If this is intended to help increase the Impact Factor for taxonomy, 
it is a futile exercise since the current IF algorithm only takes 
into account citations of papers published in the last two years (as 
has been pointed out previously on this list) and taxonomy regularly 
deals with taxa published decades and centuries old. Thus, giving the 
literature citation for every taxon cited in a paper will only be 
useful in increasing the IF (however slightly) if the original 
descriptions of those organisms were a couple of years old.

... and I'm not sure having a huge list of references would benefit 
us in the PR department either (e.g., proving to those who give 
taxonomy short shrift that we have an immense literature behind 
everything we do) when journals usually want to see a paper as 
concisely written as possible to save space, paper, costs, etc.

I have a hunch that there is a positive correlation with the higher 
the IF for a paper, the more authors on that particular paper. The 
ones I've seen that are high IF papers usually include all the lab 
techs, former major profs, janitors, etc. - it can get too silly 
(even for me). Maybe there is a bug (or hidden coefficient) in the 
algorithm that causes a high IF when the co-authors go over, say, 8 
in number. (I'll check on this) ....

-Neal