Taxonomic References

[Peter Woodall <>]

Hi Peter

I'm glad that you got some of the info you needed.

At 05:34 PM 4/04/2005 +1000, you wrote:
> Peter,
>
> That is exactly what I was after (though I realise now I wasn't real
> clear in the original e-mail). My original interest was sparked by the
> list of authors at the rear of HBW (I just used Southern Whiteface as an
> Australian example). Because this bibliography is so complete, I just
> wondered why the title wasn't also listed.

I don't know why the title wasn't included, it may be just a quirk of the
HBW editors and maybe it was to save space.  It didn't help the
authors of HBW because they
had to trace back to the full article in each case.


> Is there any reason for why this is
> the case? Is it simply for lack of space, or would many taxa be listed
> under the same title (such as "New species of Birds from
> Australia" which would then proceed to list a whle gamut of
> species)?

If there are a lot of refs to the same paper, there is an option to use
"op. cit."  [opere citato], meaning in the work cited
before.  This was widely used in the past but
seldom used these days,  probably because  of the likely
confusion in the text of knowing just which was the work cited
earlier.

Many journals are trying to reduce the possibility of confusion in
references.  In the past, journal titles were often abbreviated
using various systems (so American Naturalist could be either
Am. Nat.  or  Amer. Natur.) and it took some experience to
know that Zool. Jb. (Syst.)  referred to Zoologische Jahrbucher
(Systematik) while now many journals require that cited journal
titles are spelled out in full.

Cheers

Peter



--------------------------------------------
Birding-Aus is now on the Web at
www.birding-aus.org
--------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe from this mailing list, send the message 'unsubscribe
birding-aus' (no quotes, no Subject line)
to