>>You then need to find a suitable place to publish it.  Getting the
>>paper reviewed by competent authorities is advisable; formal scientific
>>journals send submitted papers to reviewers, but if you are thinking about
>>a shell club newsletter you should check if it is a suitable place for new
>>species descriptions.
>
>It might just be my opinion, but I don't think that a shell club newsletter
>is ever an appropriate place to publish new species descriptions.  If other
>disagree or there are valid reasons that I am overlooking I would like to
>hear what they are.  As David has pointed out journals are peer reviewed,
>which means that others working in the group of interest will (hopefully)
>look over the work for completeness, etc.

I suppose one could argue that the American Malacological Society Bulletin
could be regarded as a shell club publication.  A valid publication must be
properly published and widely available.  I believe that it is official
that it should be properly peer-reviewed, although people have gotten away
with highly dubious levels of review.  Thus, something you type up,
photocopy, and hand around at the next club meeting is inadequate.
However, if your shell club publishes a scientific journal and distributes
it to major research institutions, then that would probably be a suitable
place to publish.  Of course, you can always pass descriptions around your
shell club as a way of getting feedback.

Avoid using the new name before publication, however, to avoid confusion.
Most biological or general scientific organizations have a specific
admonition against putting new scientific names in abstracts for meetings,
as this does not constitute valid publication and will confuse later
workers when they find the name in use before it was actually published.
Some of the complicated author citations like (Smith in Jones and Harris)
come about because Smith used the names that he planned to publish as he
identified specimens for Jones and Harris.  However, Jones and Harris
published faster and happened to include a phrase like "This species can be
recognized by its distinctive green spines" along with their list of
species.  It gets even more confused if Jones and Harris do not make it
clear that this is Smith's new species.  They may accidentally end up
officially naming it themselves.

It should be kept in mind when you are looking for older references that
the rules have gotten much more strict over time.  To a large extent, this
is in order to accommodate the use of names published before formal rules
were developed.  Thus, in very old publications, simply publishing a
recognizable picture with a name was enough to be considered a formal
description.


Dr. David Campbell
"Old Seashells"
Department of Geological Sciences
CB 3315 Mitchell Hall
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill NC 27599-3315 USA
[log in to unmask], 919-962-0685, FAX 919-966-4519

"He had discovered an unknown bivalve, forming a new genus"-E. A. Poe, The
Gold Bug