PLoS One. 2016 Sep 14;11(9):e0162648. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0162648.
1Core Science Analytics, Synthesis and Libraries Program,
Core Science Systems Mission Area, U.S. Geological Survey, Reston,
Virginia, United States of America.
Abstract
The
synonyms of biological species names are shown to be an important
component in comprehensive searches of electronic scientific literature
databases but they are not well leveraged within the major literature
databases examined. For accepted or valid species names in the
Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) which have synonyms in
the system, and which are found in citations within PLoS, PMC, PubMed or
Scopus, both the percentage of species for which citations will not be
found if synonyms are not used, and the percentage increase in number of
citations found by including synonyms are very often substantial.
However, there is no correlation between the number of synonyms per
species and the magnitude of the effect. Further, the number of
citations found does not generally increase proportionally to the number
of synonyms available. Users looking for literature on specific species
across all of the resources investigated here are often missing large
numbers of citations if they are not manually augmenting their searches
with synonyms. Of course, missing citations can have serious
consequences by effectively hiding
critical information. Literature searches should include synonym
relationships and a new web service in ITIS, with examples of how to
apply it to this issue, was developed as a result of this study, and is
here announced, to aide in this.
