Consultant reports and web pages as citable resources -- or not

[Curtis Clark]

At 09:34 2002.11.11, Barry Roth wrote:
>The situation I had in mind was where a taxon has been referred to in
>unpublished reports by a vernacular name or by a formula such as "Xus new
>species B."  The point of including that name and citation in a synonymy
>at the start of a published monographic account of the species would be to
>provide continuity -- perhaps particularly as an aid to the agencies that
>may have oversight responsibility for the taxon.
>Granted, the equivalency could be stated in a sentence somewhere in the
>Remarks section, but is there any reason to prefer that over the
>efficiency of standard synonymy format to convey the same information?

I agree. To the users of names, there is no difference between a name and a
"name", until that difference is pointed out, and the absence of widely
used nomina nuda can be a source of continued confusion ("Is it a different
taxon?", "Didn't the author do her homework?", etc.).

If God hadn't intended us to cite nomina nuda, he wouldn't have given us
the abbreviation nom. nud. :-)


--
Curtis Clark                  http://www.csupomona.edu/~jcclark/
Biological Sciences Department            Voice: +1 909 869 4062
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