[Taxacom] Finding your species in Mendeley

[Paul van Rijckevorsel]

From: "Roderic Page" <r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk>
Sent: Wednesday, December 07, 2011 11:21 PM

> One thing which perhaps is getting lost in this discussion is that if we
> have the literature digitised and accessible then we don't need to "trust"
> nomenclators, we can simply look at the actual publication. Personally, as
> much as I admire the work nomenclators do (and continue to do) I'm much
> more reassured if I can see the evidence for myself.
>
> Nomenclators are fundamentally just indexing strings in publications. At
> the moment they are a little like a Google search that says "here are to
> top ten results for your search", but doesn't give links you can click on
> to see the results for yourself. I doubt most people would find that
> satisfactory. But this is the situation facing most nomenclature.

***
If they are functioning properly, nomenclators are more than just indexes
of publications. Original publications are not (necessarily) reliable
sources for names. This is even true for zoology, and much more so for
botany.

But certainly it helps to have links to original publications, plus links to
all publications that have subsequent nomenclatural acts, plus links to
publications that have taxonomic decisions.

Paul