[Taxacom] Automated monitoring of the taxonomic literature

[John Grehan]

I sort of cringe when I see yet another literature database experiment (for
all that I admire the effort), especially when the principal problem of
tracking all the literature remains - as noted by Stephen. Once upon a time
when I had institutional access to Zoo Record and Biosis (do these still
exist) I could feel fairly confident of a good coverage of the literature.
Now I don't have that and find I rely, to whatever extent I can, on a
Google search. And of course that is probably hit and miss, especially for
many Chinese journal publications. I wonder if in the best of all worlds
whether all journals (at least selfishly those publishing taxonomic and
systematic information) would post their contents online with some sort of
universal tag  (keyworded taxonomy or systematics) that could be
automatically swept up by any search engine. Dreams are free, at least.

Cheers, John Grehan

On Tue, Nov 23, 2021 at 4:36 PM Stephen Thorpe via Taxacom <
taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> wrote:

>  I find that a Google search is quite good for this purpose! Particularly
> for the big journals like Zootaxa and ZooKeys. It is the more obscure
> journals and particularly book chapters and other odd things without a good
> online presence which are the tricky things to monitor for. Looks to me
> like your proposal works best for the easy cases only, meaning that there
> is a high level of redundancy! Feel free to convince me otherwise, Rod!
> :)Cheers, Stephen
>     On Wednesday, 24 November 2021, 10:13:42 am NZDT, Roderic Page via
> Taxacom <taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu> wrote:
>
>  Hi all,
>
> A common theme which comes up when discussing the taxonomic literature is
> how to keep on top of it all and keep track of recent discoveries in
> particular taxonomic groups (e.g., what are the latest papers on reptiles).
> Some may recall the uBioRSS tool put together by Dave Remsen and Patrick
> Leary that has sadly been defunct for a few years. Inspired by that earlier
> work I’ve made a start on doing something similar, which you can see at
> https://biorss.herokuapp.com
>
> The goal is to have a tool that enables you to browse the latest
> literature, drilling down by taxonomic group and/or country. I’ve only just
> started populating the underlying database so the number of sources is very
> limited. There is a blog post that gives some background to the project
> https://iphylo.blogspot.com/2021/11/revisiting-rss-to-monitor-latests.html
>
> I’d welcome feedback.
>
> I’m curious as to whether the interface is useful or not. Note that you
> can get a feed for any view so instead of relying on my interface you can
> view the feed in any news reader. If you want an RSS feed for spiders in
> China then you can have that.
>
> I’d also welcome suggestions for journals to source articles from. I’m
> adding the obvious suspects (Zootaxa and ZooKeys, Phytotaxa and PhytoKeys)
> but hope to add others. I’m also looking to add feeds from PubMed and
> Google Scholar (e.g., search for “new species”).
>
>
> Regards,
>
> Rod
>
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------
> Roderic Page
> Professor of Taxonomy
> Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
> College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
> Graham Kerr Building
> University of Glasgow
> Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK
>
> Email:  Roderic.Page at glasgow.ac.uk<mailto:Roderic.Page at glasgow.ac.uk>
> Tel:  +44 141 330 4778
> Skype:  rdmpage
> Facebook:  http://www.facebook.com/rdmpage
> LinkedIn:  https://uk.linkedin.com/in/rdmpage
> Twitter:  https://twitter.com/rdmpage
> Telegram: rdmpage
> Blog:  https://iphylo.blogspot.com
> ORCID:  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7101-9767
> Citations:  https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?hl=en&user=4Z5WABAAAAAJ
> ResearchGate https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Roderic_Page
>
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