Dear Barry and others,

The three most important elements to describing a new species are: Peer review, peer review, and peer review.

Our problems come from three important sources: no peer review, no peer review, and no peer review.

By peer review I mean anonymous independent outside reviewers not some ginned up editorial board.

Yours,


John K. Tucker
-----Original message-----
From: Barry Roth [log in to unmask]
Date: Sun, 03 Jun 2007 22:31:49 -0500
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: naming shells

I'll second the recommendation of "Describing Species" by Judith Winston, and not just because she used one of my land snail species descriptions as an example of how to do it.  In fact I would place it above the International Code on the list of must-have books.  Of course, one wants to be familiar with the rules and recommendations of the Code itself, but "Describing Species" really gives the nuts-and-bolts that a potential species author needs.

  Another element, previously discussed on this List but not much mentioned in the current threads, is the need for peer review.  All responsible scholarly journals submit submitted manuscripts to review by third parties, and the value of this process for uncovering overlooked problems or suggesting ways for improving a paper cannot be overstated.  Objections to the process ("I [the submitting author] know more about this new species than anyone else, so how can a reviewer help me?" -- and so forth) are cop-outs; and an editor often needs external opinions to come to a decision to publish or not to publish a submitted paper.

  Final observation: some posters write about "describing species and forms" as though that was the same process.  Again -- the point made by so many before me: "forms," as infrasubspecific entities, are not covered by the rules of the ICZN and do not enter into formal zoological nomenclature.  I suppose there really are no rules regarding naming "forms" -- caveat emptor.

  Barry Roth

[log in to unmask] wrote:
  The next book is Judith E. Winston. 1999. Describing Species. Practical
Taxonomic Procedure for Biologists. Columbia University Press, New York.
xx + 518 pp.

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