[Taxacom] Open review as a wiki

[Paul van Rijckevorsel]

From: "Richard Pyle" <deepreef at bishopmuseum.org>
> I agree that the perception by most recent taxonomists (including me) is
> consistent with that expressed by Don Colless and Paul van Rijckevorsel.
> And I further agree that a bibligraphic citation for a concept
> circumscription is more important than a citation for an original
> description of a name.

> However, my point was directed at those people concerned that the science
> of taxonomy is under-rated due to inadequate citation indexing, even when
> such citation indexing is perfectly justifiable.

> I support my "perfectly justifiable" comment above on the basis of many,
> many historical and modern monographs and revisions, which provide
> citation details as well as authors among the synonymy listings in species
> treatments.  That these full citation details are often provided
> underscores the legitimacy of them warranting such citation.  That they
> are included  in the synonymy listing instead of the bibliogrpahy section
> may well explain why taxonomic works are not given approproiate weight in
> the context of citation indexing.

> If what I just said above does not make sense, please let me know and I
> will provide an example.

***
I appreciate the sentiment, but am unsure of the means suggested.

Indeed, taxonomy papers often provide full citation details for names used.
However, ecology papers and the like usually don't. Although they often do
provide the author(s) and the year of publication, in fact this appears to
be ritual rather functional. If a name is in common use ("out there") then
it is very unlikely that there are issues with homonymy and priority. The
world at large does not know what a homonym is, anyway.

Also, many of the names in use are fairly old and were published with such
minimal descriptions that the method used is only marginally scientific (by
todays's standards). So even if a "SIF (Sustained Impact Factor)" is adopted
this may lead to high SIFs for certain authors who published a lot of names,
but are not necessarily of great importance to the science of Taxonomy.
Other authors, who did contribute a great deal to taxonomic thought, but
published few names would be neglected.

It looks to me that it is time to invent a different strategy.
Paul