[Taxacom] Citing Authors for Animals

[Scott Thomson]

Hi Tony,

Although i acknowledge it requires some work to disambiguate author names,
and yes I do this for turtles only, it is not impossible. All you need is a
table in your database which is primary keyed to real name but also has a
field of display name, which is not required to be unique. The database can
then run appropriate queries on this and deal with those of us with common
names.

I agree with Stephen here, in the modern world of the web people expect all
the data, the name should at least kink to the citation, if not a pdf. I
get the latter is not always possible. It is not hard to do, even excel
could do it, though i would recommend sql.

Cheers Scott.
On Oct 18, 2015 6:20 PM, "Stephen Thorpe" <stephen_thorpe at yahoo.co.nz>
wrote:

> Tony,
> In the internet age, we should be directly linking author/date to the
> original publication (or at least a citation of the original publication,
> with a link to content where available).
> Cheers,
> Stephen
>
> --------------------------------------------
> On Mon, 19/10/15, Tony Rees <tonyrees49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Citing Authors for Animals
>  To: "Mary Barkworth" <Mary.Barkworth at usu.edu>
>  Cc: "Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu" <Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu>
>  Received: Monday, 19 October, 2015, 9:08 AM
>
>  Hi Mary,
>
>  You wrote:
>
>  ...the scientific names in ITIS are not, in
>  themselves a problem. It is
>  > connecting
>  them to the appropriate author and parent – which is a
>  simple
>  > relationship to set up once one
>  has downloaded the file for one’s taxa.
>  >
>
>  I should
>  probably point out that, as a botanist, you will be used to
>  a
>  "standard form" of each distinct
>  author (e.g. lots of Smiths will each be
>  cited differently, in their own unique way)
>  which neatly solves the
>  disambiguation
>  problem for author names for botanists, In zoological
>  usage
>  this is not so, so there will be many
>  authors cited e.g. simply as "Smith"
>  who are in fact different (only Smiths liable
>  to be confused, for example
>  different Smiths
>  working on the same group in a similar time period, would
>  normally be distinguished via the use of
>  initials). This means modelling
>  such names
>  as the equivalent of real persons in a database is not
>  really
>  possible without a lot of additional
>  work (which I am sure you do not want
>  to
>  do...). I and (I believe) most others do not attempt to do a
>  lot more
>  with zoological author names in
>  large scale data systems than treat them as
>  a plain text extension following the scientific
>  name (optionally searchable
>  if desired) -
>  the exceptions to this are workers in a restricted field
>  (such as Eschmeyer's Catalog of Fishes) who
>  go further, research the
>  initials and
>  identity for every author, and so distinguish between them
>  in
>  order to link to publications etc.
>
>  Just mentioning this in case
>  it changes what you plan to do,
>
>  Best regards - Tony
>
>  --
>  Tony Rees, New South Wales,
>  Australia
>  https://about.me/TonyRees
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