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Re: Impact Factor confirms Nature is top research journal



Absolutely 100% agree. I'd be more supportive of journals like Nature
and Science if people would follow up these articles with full
taxonomic descriptions. Otherwise they're not much better than just
publishing the names, cause all the work has to be redone later
anyways. Taxonomy is one of the strongest data points we have for
making the important discoveries (or inferences) featured in these
journals, yet it all too often seems to get pushed to the back burner.
I wonder if anyone has every looked into how often the typically brief
taxonomic descriptions found in these journals are followed up with
full taxonomic descriptions by the same authors, and how many either
were never fully described or were described years later by someone
else.

Clint Boyd.

On Fri, Aug 14, 2009 at 5:45 PM, David
Marjanovic<david.marjanovic@gmx.at> wrote:
>>  Those who think that self-publishing/sending out a newsletter with
>>  dinosaur names is just as good as publishing one's papers in a
>>  journal should  read the following.
>
> To be fair, the _extended abstracts_ that Nature publishes as "Letters to
> Nature" usually leave much to be desired, too. Especially if they're not
> accompanied by ninety-five pages of supplementary information (I took this
> number from, I think, Turner et al. 2007). And need I even mention the usual
> quality of Nature photos, both in print and in PDF?
>
> I'm not saying people shouldn't try to publish in Nature (indeed, in some
> countries like France, they basically _must_); just that Nature papers
> should be followed by detailed descriptions in more specialized journals
> with more generous (or no) space restrictions.
>



-- 
C. Aaroen Boyd
PhD Candidate
Jackson School of Geosciences
The University of Texas at Austin
cab@mail.utexas.edu
www.stratfit.org