University of Glasgow

Roderic Page

An undergraduate student (Aime Rankin) doing a project with me on
citation and impact of museum collections came across a paper I hadn\'t
seen before:  

> Strasser, B. J. (2011, March). The Experimenter's Museum: GenBank,
> Natural History, and the Moral Economies of Biomedicine. Isis.
> University of Chicago Press.
> [doi:10.1086/658657](http://dx.doi.org/10.1086/658657)

  
  
Unfortunately the paper is behind a paywall, but here\'s the abstract
(you can also get a PDF
[here](http://biologie.unige.ch/assets/brunostrasser/Strasser_Isis_2011.pdf)):  
  

> Today, the production of knowledge in the experimental life sciences
> relies crucially on the use of biological data collections, such as
> DNA sequence databases. These collections, in both their creation and
> their current use, are embedded in the experimentalist tradition. At
> the same time, however, they exemplify the natural historical
> tradition, based on collecting and comparing natural facts. This essay
> focuses on the issues attending the establishment in 1982 of GenBank,
> the largest and most frequently accessed collection of experimental
> knowledge in the world. The debates leading to its creation---about
> the collection and distribution of data, the attribution of credit and
> authorship, and the proprietary nature of knowledge---illuminate the
> different moral economies at work in the life sciences in the late
> twentieth century. They offer perspective on the recent rise of public
> access publishing and data sharing in science. More broadly, this
> essay challenges the big picture according to which the rise of
> experimentalism led to the decline of natural history in the twentieth
> century. It argues that both traditions have been articulated into a
> new way of producing knowledge that has become a key practice in
> science at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

  
It\'s well worth a read. It argues that sequence databases such as
Genbank are essentially the equivalent of the great natural history
museums of the 19th Century. There are several ironies here. One is that
some early advocates of molecular biology cast it as a modern,
experimental science as opposed to mere natural history. However, once
the amount of molecular data became too great for individuals to easily
manage, and once it became clear that many of the questions being asked
required a comparative approach, the need for a centralised database of
sequences (the \"experimenter\'s museum\" of the title of the paper)
became increasingly urgent. Another irony is that the clash between
molecular and morphological taxonomy overlooks these striking
similarities in history (collecting ever increasing amounts of data
eventually requiring centralisation).  
  
Bruno Strasser\'s article also discusses the politics behind setting up
GenBank, including the inevitable challenge of securing funding, and the
concerns of many individual scientists about the loss of control over
their data. A final irony is that, having gone through this process once
with the formation of the big museums in the 19th century, we are going
through it again with the wrangling over aggregating the digitised
versions of the content of those museums.  
  
Update: See also  

> Strasser, B. J. (2008, October 24). GENETICS: GenBank\--Natural
> History in the 21st Century? Science. American Association for the
> Advancement of Science (AAAS).
> [doi:10.1126/science.1163399](http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1163399)

(via [Guanyang Zhang](http://twitter.com/GYZhang2)).


An undergraduate student (Aime Rankin) doing a project with me on citation and impact of museum collections came across a paper I hadn't seen before:Unfortunately the paper is behind a paywall, but here's the abstract (you can also get a PDF here):It's well worth a read. It argues that sequence databases such as Genbank are essentially the equivalent of the great natural history museums of the 19th Century. There are several ironies here.

The Experimenter’s Museum: GenBank, Natural History, and the Moral Economies of Biomedicine

![359f89198dca80b0f99b3208e1cfedde](http://lh6.ggpht.com/-9BAecOq8guY/UZc2JsdUYBI/AAAAAAAACyM/vpOij2hvcpU/359f89198dca80b0f99b3208e1cfedde.jpeg?imgmax=800 "359f89198dca80b0f99b3208e1cfedde.jpeg"){border="0"
width="128" height="128" style="float:right;"}

> iPhylo: GBIF specimens in BioStor: who are the top ten
> museums?(Unfortunately not @[amnh](https://twitter.com/amnh))
> [iphylo.blogspot.com/2012/02/gbif-s...](http://t.co/umhLz8MR8d "http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2012/02/gbif-specimens-in-biostor-who-are-top.html?spref=tw")
>
> --- Susan Perkins (@NYCuratrix) [May 14,
> 2013](https://twitter.com/NYCuratrix/status/334356241226821636)

  
Ideas on measuring the \"impact\" of a natural history collection have
been bubbling along, as reflected in [recent comments on
iPhylo](http://iphylo.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/linking-gbif-and-biodiversity-heritage.html#comment-898170035),
and some offline discussions I\'ve been having with David Blackburn and
Alan Resetar.  
  
My focus has been at the specimen-level, with a view to motivation the
adoption of persistent specimen-level identifiers so that we can
citations of specimens over time (e.g., in publications and databases
such as GenBank). Not only does this provide a measure of the \"impact\"
of a collection, it helps with provenance. If we sequence a specimen
that is subsequently assigend to a different taxon and we have a way of
tracking that specimen via its identifier, then we can transmit that new
identification to other consumers of data based on that specimen. For
example, we could automatically notify GenBank that what we thought was
an *x* is actually a *y*.  
  
So I made a simple [\"league table\" of museum
collections](http://iphylo.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/gbif-specimens-in-biostor-who-are-top.html)
based on specimens cited in [BioStor](http://biostor.org). There are all
sorts of issues with this approach. Once you rank collections, people
may use that to argue some can be axed and more resources funnelled into
others. A more positive approach would be to indetify collections that
are underused, and try and figure out why. And in the same way that
taxonomic papers may have a citation long life, specimens may sit in a
museum for a long time before being cited (for example, when eventually
recognised as a new species
[doi:10.1016/j.cub.2012.10.029](http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2012.10.029)).
So, metrics can be a double-edged sword.  
  
Citing specimens is a useful metric, but not all citations are equal,
and not all citations are immediate. A specimen that yields DNA
sequences that are published in, say, *Nature*, arguably has more weight
than a specimen listed in a rarely cited paper. Likewise, subsequent
citations of a paper that cites a specimen should confer more weight on
the value of that specimen. Elsewhere
([doi:10.1093/bib/bbn022](http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/bib/bbn022),
preprint here:
[hdl:10101/npre.2008.1760.1](http://hdl.handle.net/10101/npre.2008.1760.1))
I\'ve argued for a Google PageRank-style way to measure the impact of a
specimen that takes into account papers and other objects derived from a
specimen (e.g., images, sequences).  
  
Meanwhile, Morgan Jackson alerted me to a quicker way to get a measure
of the impact of the collection.  

> @[rdmpage](https://twitter.com/rdmpage)
> @[nycuratrix](https://twitter.com/nycuratrix) Check Nature for a
> recent note about this. A bird museum calc. their collection\'s
> h-score from papers citing specimens
>
> --- Morgan Jackson (@BioInFocus) [May 16,
> 2013](https://twitter.com/BioInFocus/status/335007197568311298)

::: {.altmetric-embed style="float:right;" badge-type="donut" doi="10.1038/493480b"}
:::

  
The \"short note\" Morgan refers to is by [Kevin
Winker](http://www.kevinwinker.org/) and Jack J. Withrow:  

> Winker, K., & Withrow, J. J. (2013). Natural history: Small
> collections make a big impact. Nature, 493(7433), 480--480.
> [doi:10.1038/493480b](http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/493480b)

  
They constructed a [Google Scholar
profile](http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=EbOuSfwAAAAJ) and
collected papers that cite the University of Alaska Museum\'s bird
collection (see [here for full
details](http://www.kevinwinker.org/Creation%20of%20UAM%20Birds%20Google%20Scholar%20profile.pdf)).
The *h*-score of this collection of papers is 42, which Winkler and
Withrow note is \"equivalent to an average Nobel laureate in physics\".
Here\'s the graph of citations over time:  
  
![Chart
1](http://lh5.ggpht.com/-UqMqnwh2uEA/UZTgOE84odI/AAAAAAAACx8/1bbwEVOpJlI/chart%252520%2525281%252529.png?imgmax=800 "chart (1).png"){style="display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;"
border="0" width="475" height="90"}  
It\'s a neat trick, if a little time consuming. But one advantage it has
is that it puts collections on a similar footing to individual
researchers. You could imagine asking the question \"how much money
would you spend supporting a researcher at this level?\" How does this
compare to the resources actually being spent?  
  
One thing I hope will emerge from discussions like this is a desire to
make specimens first-class citizens of the web, with stable identifiers
that enable them to be cited in the same way we cite papers and,
increasingly, data sets.


Ideas on measuring the "impact" of a natural history collection have been bubbling along, as reflected in recent comments on iPhylo, and some offline discussions I've been having with David Blackburn and Alan Resetar.My focus has been at the specimen-level, with a view to motivation the adoption of persistent specimen-level identifiers so that we can citations of specimens over time (e.g., in publications and databases such as GenBank). Not only

Publicaciones de Rogue Scholar

The Experimenter’s Museum: GenBank, Natural History, and the Moral Economies of Biomedicine

The impact of museum collections: one collection ≈ one Nobel Prize