[Taxacom] Finding your species in Mendeley

[Geoffrey Read]

Hi Rod,

I'll put the 'tout tout' bit first.  Ordinary new or updated WoRMS entries
can look more like this routine one (done yesterday) with a nice type
locality map, and a source (citation) with a doi hot link going bang to
the pdf of the original description. Links to whatever on the web is
relevant can be added, also images. So the potential is there.

http://www.marinespecies.org/polychaeta/aphia.php?p=taxdetails&idY0097

However, the fleshing of the skeleton is variable. Because the base data
arose from many origins, a lot of WoRMS entries can be the checklist type
you noticed - eg., I noticed for Isopoda the 'source' might be only a
'basis of record' type from Schotte et als World list. Not adequate to you
or me, because it doesn't have the source for the original description. 
Polychaeta section is rather better off with a good proportion of original
description literature of 10,000 papers (in the database) linked, and but
still many 'basis of record' ones exist that just indicate "we got this
from somewhere, trust us, but sorry, it's not fully referenced").

I'm all for adding good live links to the primary literature. Best done
manually, but that will take years for WoRMS, and auto matching is worth
developing, as long as the resultant links are identified as unverified &
user beware, and I don't need to spend my days removing the real duds from
my area. Sorry if that sounds a bit pessimistic, and I'm eager to see how
itaxon develops, but of course.


Geoff

On Tue, December 6, 2011 9:55 pm, Roderic Page wrote:
> Dear Geoff,
>
> On 5 Dec 2011, at 23:40, Geoff Read wrote:

>> [...]
>> WoRMS has a way to go with achieving literature mapping and the
>> important
>> facility to quickly open the original publication, supplying the link
>> for
>> which for new entries may be viewed as optional by some editors (not
>> me),
>> but it has a good literature list with mostly full rather than micro
>> citations. There may already be an automatic link to the BHL mentions of
>> the older species.
>
> My sense is that most of the literature in WoRMS is "secondary", in the
> sense that it comprises checklists, etc., which are used as sources for
> names, and an authority for usage of the name. I'm taking with Ward
> Appeltans about adding links to the primary literature from
> http://iphylo.org/~rpage/itaxon .