University of Glasgow

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David King et al.\'s paper \"Towards the bibliography of life\"
<http://dx.doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.150.2167> has just appeared in a
special issue of *ZooKeys*. I\'ve written a
[number](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2010/12/first-thoughts-on-citebank-and-bhl.html)
of
[posts](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2010/10/mendeley-bhl-and-of-life.html)
on this topic, so I\'ve a few comments.  
  
King et al. survey some of the issues, but don\'t really tackle the big
issue of how we\'re going to build this. If we define the \"bibliography
of life\" somewhat narrowly as the list of all papers that have
published a scientific name (or a new combination, such as moving a
species from one genus to another), then this is a large, but measurable
undertaking. According to ION\'s [metrics
page](http://www.organismnames.com/metrics.htm), these are the numbers
involved (for animals and protozoa):  
  

|                                |           |
|--------------------------------|----------:|
| Total New Names                | 1,510,402 |
| Total New Genera / Subgenera   |   215,242 |
| Total New Species / Subspecies | 1,192,366 |
| Total Other New Names          |   102,794 |
| Total New Combinations         |   241,296 |
| Total New Synonyms             |   260,544 |

  
  
Even in the worse case scenario of one name per publication ([clearly
not the case](http://www.organismnames.com/metrics.htm?page=tsp)) this
is big, but not insurmountable, task.  
  
**Publications not taxa**  
Part of the challenge is figuring out the best way to tackle the
problem. In the past, most efforts at building taxonomic bibliographies
have focussed on specific taxa, which is natural --- the bibliographies
are being built by taxonomists and they specialise in particular groups.
But I\'d argue that this is not the most efficient way to tackle the
problem. Because the taxonomic literature is so widely dispersed, after
the obvious \"low hanging fruit\" have been collected, considerable
effort must be spent tracking down the harder to find citations. There
are few economies of scale in this approach. In contrast, if we focus on
publications at, say, the level of journal, then we can build a
bibliography much more quickly. Once we\'ve found the source, say, for
one article, often we could use that information to harvest many
articles from the same source (e.g., write scripts to harvest from a
digital repository such as a DSpace server, or a digital library such as
Gallica). But if we are focussed on a particular taxon, we will ignore
the other articles in that journal (\"what do I care about fish, [I like
turtles](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMNry4PE93Y)\").  
  
Put another way, if we imagine a taxa × publication matrix, then we can
either go after rows (i.e., a bibliography for a specific taxonomic
group), or columns (a list of articles in a specific journal). The
article-based approach will be faster, albeit at the cost of finding
articles that aren\'t necessarily relevant to taxonomy. This is why I\'m
spending what feels like far too much time [harvesting article lists and
uploading these to
Mendeley](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2010/10/mendeley-bhl-and-of-life.html).
It is also one reason BHL has been so successful. They\'ve simply gone
after scanning the literature wholesale, rather than focussing on
particular taxonomic groups.  
  
![Taxapublicationmatrix](http://lh5.ggpht.com/-r2Yr_agFMCY/TtSorEQcFOI/AAAAAAAABD8/s3THyqPgQ6U/taxapublicationmatrix.png?imgmax=800 "taxapublicationmatrix.png"){style="display:block; margin-left:auto; margin-right:auto;"
border="0" width="404" height="362"}![Wikispecies logo
en](http://lh5.ggpht.com/-L_RsG4MUpbQ/TtSosDu4iEI/AAAAAAAABEA/CEuGYhlOHLc/Wikispecies-logo-en.png?imgmax=800 "Wikispecies-logo-en.png"){border="0"
width="125" height="160" style="float:right;"}**Crowd sourcing and
Wikispecies**  
Crowd sourcing often strikes me as a euphemism for \"we can\'t be
bothered doing the tedious stuff, lets get the public to do it for us
(plus it will look like we\'re engaged with the public).\" I\'m not
denying can work, but I suspect it\'s not a magic bullet. Perhaps the
best crowd sourcing is not to try and bring the crowd to a project, but
go where the crowd has already gathered. In this case, an obvious crowd
is the [Wikispecies](http://species.wikimedia.org/) community. Working
with the ION database for [my Sherborn
presentation](http://iphylo.blogspot.com/2011/10/sherborn-presentation-on-open-taxonomy.html),
it\'s clear that the quality of bibliographic data in ION is variable,
and rather poor for older references. In contrast, the reference lists
on Wikispecies can be very good (e.g., [the bibliography for George
Boulenger](http://species.wikimedia.org/wiki/George_Albert_Boulenger)).
There are some issues with Wikispecies, notably the lack of a decent
bibliographic template (unlike Wikipedia) so parsing references can be
\*cough\* interesting, but there is scope here to use it to improve
other databases. Citation matching can be a challenge, but in this case
we have citations indexed by taxonomic name (in both ION and
Wikispecies), which greatly reduces the scope of possible matches.  
  
**Summary**  
I think building the \"bibliography of life\" needs a combination of
aggressive data gathering, and avoiding building additional tools unless
absolutely needed. There are great tools and communities that can
already be leveraged (e.g., Mendeley, Wikispecies), let\'s make use of
them.


David King et al.'s paper "Towards the bibliography of life" http://dx.doi.org/10.3897/zookeys.150.2167 has just appeared in a special issue of
<em>
 ZooKeys
</em>
. I've written a number of posts on this topic, so I've a few comments. King et al. survey some of the issues, but don't really tackle the big issue of how we're going to build this.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

Towards the bibliography of life