[Taxacom] Zootaxa's impact on Wikipedia

[Moretzsohn, Fabio]

Rod wrote: 
"I argue that if taxonomists (and others) contributed well-referenced  
articles to Wikipedia, they'd help improve the quality of that  
resource, as well as making taxonomic literature much more visible."

We need a new impact formula for taxonomic journals AND databases.
Ideally, such impact factor would take into account things like:
-	journal citations (without a cutoff date, or at least a much
longer period, say 50 years);
-	citations in Wikipedia, EOL, ZooBank, GenBank, TOL, ITIS, and
other online databases and websites;
-	number of hits on taxonomic pages in Wikipedia, EOL, etc;
-	specimens in institutional collections that were identified
using a paper or database;
-	citations of the species, even if the original description is
not cited (as in the majority of cases); 
-	a count of pages with species names indexed by Google (or other
search engines) could also be included in the calculation of the impact
factor;
-	etc.

It would be very difficult to calculate such of an impact factor, but
there could be some clever ways to estimate the number of "citations" of
a species name (and the original description). One day, when we have a
fully indexed and populated ZooBank it will be easy (easier) to track
down the citation of the original description. 

Perhaps Zootaxa and other taxonomic journals should try to come up with
a taxonomic impact factor.

Cheers,
Fabio

-------------------------------------------------
Fabio Moretzsohn, Ph.D.
Assistant Research Scientist
Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies
Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi
6300 Ocean Drive, Unit 5869, Corpus Christi, TX 78412-5869
Phone: (361) 825-3230; Fax: (361) 825-2050
fabio.moretzsohn [at] tamucc.edu
P Please consider the environment before printing this email.  Think
Green!