Recently I was explaining to students the universal problem of the low citation of taxonomic literature and how this potentially can affect those who practice this discipline with respect to funding, academic promotion and so forth. During the discussion I noted some of the ways that taxonomic journals / literature has attempted to redress this; consider for example the way Phytotaxa deals with the authorship citation of names, e.g., Blitum chenopodioides Linnaeus 1771: 170. Students noted (correctly) that this can make for some pretty cumbersome reading, I noted it can also make for some very tedious formatting for the authors submitting such papers.
C'est la vie!
Now while I don't personally accept that citation is in itself evidence of success as a scientist, I understand and appreciate it is still a commonly used metric in considering one's success in one's chosen field. I also appreciate that, as a biosystematist that my taxonomic work, as with many of us is not often cited, though the names I have formalized are used widely, so clearly the true impact of what we do is often difficult to gauge.
With that attempted 'succinct' summary of taxonomic citation as I see it, I was then asked by a student if anyone has worked out how often Carl Linnaeus has been cited - not just generically for example, for his Species Planatarium works but specifically for each of the 'species' (used here sensu lato to encompass all of the Linnean ranks from genus and below) he described?
There, after some admittedly minor attempts to find out, I drew a blank.
So I wonder if anyone out there has looked into this?
I recently cited an author for a recent genus name change in my paper
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