Sunday, November 29, 2009

Taxononomist's sloppiness - a solution

I have been quiet for a long time - it was a very creative phase during which we achieved a lot regarding making taxonomic descriptions online accessible on Plazi. See following blogs.
One new tool we created at Plazi in GoldenGATE, our mark-up tool, is to find all the citations in a publications, parse its element out which then allows to link all the references within the publications to those citations the author provides.

This helps to provide, if all will goes well, to have immediate access to the original literature from within the descriptions we post on plazi.

But it also is a fantastic editorial too, since it finds all the references that are not cited at the end.

For example, Seifert's revision in Myrmecological News of the Formica rufibarbis group has three omissions: Linnaeus 1758, Latreille 1798, and Seifert 1992.