[Taxacom] Match taxa Re: Finding your species in Mendeley

[Geoff Read]

Dear Richard,

Specifics would be easier to reply to, and investigate - without causing
you further work.

I'm sorry if you feel misled.  If I oversold this little-known search
option in my earlier post it was unintentional. I didn't intend to give
the impression a species list extracted from WoRMS using the authority
field method would be THE 100% inclusive marine species list of that
author, as known to an expert such as yourself; only that you'd see what
was in this particular database, and that the result would be useful.  It
is also another good tool to explore quickly what is in WoRMS,
deficiencies and all.

You could also easily directly test WoRMS against your superior lists
using the 'match taxa' option. It works well. That would be interesting as
it would show if the reasons for the non-appearance of names in your list
were due to missing data in the WoRMS authority field, or the real absence
of the name, or misspellings. Any of those could be reported to the
relevant editor or the database team and hopefully soon remedied. If you
don't want to do that process just send the files to the database team.
And so we would progress.

Geoff


On Thu, December 8, 2011 10:31 am, Richard Petit wrote:
> I am unable to verify the statement about retrieval of a "list of marine
> species authored by anyone."  I tried a couple of (long deceased) authors
> whose works are familiar and whose taxa I have in list form, and WoRMS
> comes
> up very short.  I realize that WoRMS is a "work in progress" and incorrect
> statements about its capabilties do not do much to enhance its image.
>
> dick p.
>
>> On 5 Dec 2011, at 23:40, Geoff Read wrote:
>>
>>> Rod mentioned WoRMS earlier. Just to point out that in WoRMS,
>>> www.marinespecies.org, one can already get the list of marine species
>>> authored by anyone by a taxon search using the Authority option. For
>>> example 'd'Orbigny' yields links to 412 marine species names
>>> (d'Orbigny is unlikely to be setting up a Mendeley account any time
>>> soon, so this is handy). Name disambiguation is possible at least by
>>> taxon group, and by date of publication (eg., easy to find that
>>> d'Orbigny published at least
>>> 179 species in the 1830s, from which a further 106 recombinations
>>> exist).
>