I think that the problem that now arises comes from some 20 years ago when the faculties of Biology began the division into different degrees of Clinical Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Instrumental Techniques in Biology, ... due to the new work niche that appears in the Research in Medicine at the Molecular Level. It was significant, in France, the disappearance of Botany and Zoology as laboratories of the CNRS and the Universities. In addition, Botany and Zoology are degrees on Environmental Biodiversity or are degrees on Evolutionary Biology that take into account only molecular techniques. In my opinion, the problem for the future will be that there will be no specialists who can identify the animals and plants of those genotypes (not genomes) that are written about in specialized Journals. Zoologists and Botanists are researchers to be extinguished and it is difficult for them to achieve Research projects in any country if they do not associate with researchers from other subjects such as interdisciplinary groups. The niche is getting smaller and smaller and so is the number of Journals that accept these papers (except those related to parasites, pests, etc.). Species that we do not know will become extinct before they are known and described.

The high rate of self citation with Zootaxa seems to

me to only be a problem because there are only a few journals where pure taxonomy is the focus, especially for more obscure taxa groups. This results in many papers going in this journal because few alternatives exist. In my opinion a journal that does a good job attracting papers, provides solid timely peer reviews, is well read by the community, but suffers from excessive self citations due to a small group of workers and/or few journals that cover the topic should not be stripped of its impact factor. Also I think the field of botany has more journals that focus on taxonomy, and because of this papers are more evenly distributed among different journals and as such self citation rates are naturally lower.

Dear Colleagues

I think it was the editorial policy of the journal that led to what happened. It was necessary to foresee that the tempting price of the magazine created its own audience of authors zoologists. The magazine has competitors, but the payment for publication in them is many times higher. Now I hope this magazine example will be a science for everyone.

Regards, Pushkin Sergey Viktorovich

Yes, I agree with all of you. The diagnosis is good but what we can do in the future?

The problem is with the Impact Factor itself. If a new genus is described in Zootaxa and then later new species are added to that genus in a paper in Zootaxa, and cite the original paper in Zootaxa, that counts against Zootaxa in regards to the journals self citation rate. In this way this journal became a victim of its own success, but it certainly does not mean that the science is bad, or that the journal is not having an impact. In fact including less relevant citations from another journal just in order to effect self citation rates introduces its own bias that could result in a less informative paper. What we really need are more affordable, credible ways to publish purely taxonomic works. And we need to focus less on IF and more on the actual science.

Thanks for sharing your knowledge

I think that the problem that now arises comes from some 20 years ago when the faculties of Biology began the division into different degrees of Clinical Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, Instrumental Techniques in Biology, ... due to the new work niche that appears in the Research in Medicine at the Molecular Level. It was significant, in France, the disappearance of Botany and Zoology as laboratories of the CNRS and the Universities. In addition, Botany and Zoology are degrees on Environmental Biodiversity or are degrees on Evolutionary Biology that take into account only molecular techniques. In my opinion, the problem for the future will be that there will be no specialists who can identify the animals and plants of those genotypes (not genomes) that are written about in specialized Journals. Zoologists and Botanists are researchers to be extinguished and it is difficult for them to achieve Research projects in any country if they do not associate with researchers from other subjects such as interdisciplinary groups. The niche is getting smaller and smaller and so is the number of Journals that accept these papers (except those related to parasites, pests, etc.). Species that we do not know will become extinct before they are known and described.

Rafael, you are right. It is a big problem. It is very hard to find specialist who know how some species or plants looks like. The molecular biology and barcoding is not wrong but it can not be only method.

In lichenology we are lucky to have some high quality online only journals accepting purely taxonomic works that are free to authors and readers, supported by botanical gardens etc. but editors are volunteers and IF is low

I totally agree with professor Rafael Jordana

Hello,

I am also in agreement with Prof. Rafael Jordana. He explains the problem as well. In my opinion, John Willella is totally right; the actual science is the most important thing that we should pay our attention to it.

Best, Elaheh

I think that the high self citation rate of Zootaxa is a bit artefactual because of the citation-count policy of Clarivates. There is only a small fraction of purely taxonomy journals registered in Clarivates. Many Museum annuals, regional faunistic journals are not registered in the WoS therefore all the citation in these publications are simply non-existent for Clarivates. Some times ago I tried to have registered our zoology journal Opuscula Zoologica (http://opuscula.elte.hu) in the WoS and the answer was simply it is too small (the journal needs to improve its authors diversity and its citation activity. It ranks in Q4, in a well covered area...) . This is true for many Museum annales moreover faunistics and taxonomy seems to be well covered for them :)

Csaba Csuzdi you are right. It is a problem. But I hope that it is possible to find a solution. Taxonomy is still very important branch of biology.

Yes, Lukasz Kaczmarek and Csaba Csuzdi are totally right. Taxonomy is a very imoprtant and necessary branch of Biology. It is the fundamental field of study in every branch in Biology. We should never ignore its significance in science. So, its eligibility should be improved in a wider network of science.

Zootaxa, published by Magnolia Press (New Zealand) is a peer-reviewed scientific journal for animal taxonomy. As this journal showed high level of self citations, which is inevitable for a journal, so it was suspended. This should not happen. As it is a journal of new species classification, the journal should have its own specialty.

Corina Scripnic

Ahmed Thandar

Thank you for sharing your knowledge

I work on a small family Diptera and I am really the only person working on their taxonomy on a world wide basis. In order to advance the study of the family it is important to be able to publish new names and reviews in Zootaxa - its really the most appropriate journal. But inevitably as the only worker in the field papers usually include citations relating to my earlier works - there is no way around this. I am sure that this situation must be replicated across many other "less popular" taxa but I cant see that there is any alternative given the limited number of taxonomists available. It is important that Zootaxa continues and provides a mechanism for publishing taxonomic works which extend our knowledge of the worlds biodiversity

Iain MacGowan yes of course I agree with you that it is serious problem. By the way a self-citations are not always wrong. If you do it because you need to do to adress scientific problem properly it is totally fine. But probably there is no way to control if all scientists do it this correctly.

The general problem is that the scientometrics based on impact factors fail in many ways when trying to evaluate the quality of taxonomic research. For more details, I recommend to check this paper:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11486254_Why_impact_factors_don't_work_for_taxonomy

Anyway, the problem with high proportion of journal self-citation could be prevent quite easily in my opinion: just split Zootaxa into two smaller journals (both with the same scope) and ask taxonomists to send their papers alternately to both of them - and the amount of self-citation will drop by half soon :-)