[Taxacom] Citing Authors for Animals

[Tony Rees]

Agreed, linking to original citations and on-line texts where available is
a good goal, and some individuals/groups are already doing it... the
problem (it seems to me) is doing it at the scale required for all groups,
in a consistent and re-usable manner (so that each person does not have to
do everything again in terms of building bibliographies).

I did hear a little while back of persons keen to build the "bibliography
of life", not sure if there has been any movement in that space...

Regards - Tony

On 19 October 2015 at 08:45, Scott Thomson <scott.thomson321 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
>>  _______________________________________________
>>  Taxacom Mailing List
>>  Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
>>  http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/taxacom
>>  The Taxacom Archive back to 1992 may be
>>  searched at: http://taxacom.markmail.org
>>
>>  Celebrating 28 years of
>>  Taxacom in 2015.
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Taxacom Mailing List
>> Taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
>> http://mailman.nhm.ku.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/taxacom
>> The Taxacom Archive back to 1992 may be searched at:
>> http://taxacom.markmail.org
>>
>> Celebrating 28 years of Taxacom in 2015.
>>
>


-- 
Tony Rees, New South Wales, Australia
https://about.me/TonyRees