Some Scientists have taken over 20 yrs to work out a single genus,Some people could not complete a large angiosperm family even over three decades.Should there be any international norm for such studies where the world's leading organisations like Kew/Smithsonian Institute could play a role in deciding the time limit.
Can there be be any clear cut time limit? Revising Pipers or Impatiens is not the same as revising relatively less complex groups. Why should I allow others to dictate time limit for my work other than my employer or the funding agency of the project? Financial support is definitely a problem for long term research work but stipulated time has its own effect on research output. Do you think that the revisions of plant groups published in latest volumes of Flora Malesiana are equivalent to the quality of those published in earlier volumes? Facilities? Can one provide a budding Ph D student the instant views of an expert' on that plant group if there is no world expert in that group at all?
So in my opinion revising plant groups is unlike a mathematical sum. Number of labourers remaining same, one house can be constructed in two years, so two houses can be constructed in four years..
One cannot definitely take infinite time to complete the work but one also deserves reasonable time for a quality output. There should not be any hard and fast time limit..
One should know the difference between taxonomic revision and flora writing.In my opinion writing of Flora's of any area,district,state or country must be based on recent collections and ones own identification/description/data entry etc and should be time bound .However, one can take his own time for revisionary/monographic work.
Sorry. Your question was not clear, at least to me. I could correlate '20 yrs to work out a single genus' with a revision only. However, if anyone has taken such a long time to work out a genus for a Flora, then there must be some reasons behind that. Person concerned can only explain the situation.
The question is very broad. I can try as follows. For a flowering plants study one has to differentiate among herb,shrub and tree. So the time/years will depend on the habit of the plant. Some seasonal herbs can only take even 3-5 months. And other big trees can take 20 or more years for a scientist to study its florist identification.
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