Reconstructing historical egocentric social networks in malacology: can eponyms serve as a proxy for contacts?
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Taxonomy, Zoology
- Keywords
- science networks, nomenclature, eponymy, history of malacology
- Copyright
- © 2016 Breure
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Reconstructing historical egocentric social networks in malacology: can eponyms serve as a proxy for contacts? PeerJ Preprints 4:e2587v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2587v1
Abstract
During the 19th and 20th century eponyms have been widely used in taxonomy to honour collectors of material on which new taxa have been based. Also have new taxa been dedicated to author-colleagues. Five cases are discussed to trace the extend of overlap between eponyms and known contacts of the author, using different sources of historical data (source publications of the author, provenance data in collections, correspondence archive, reprint administration). Authors have had personal preferences in the extend to which they dedicated eponyms to persons they were in contact, either indirectly (field collectors) or directly (field collectors, cabinet collectors or collegial authors). Eponyms named after a person who is known to have authored malacological papers strongly suggests that there was contact between the two authors (correspondence and/or exchange of material). If eponyms were given in reciprocation their contacts were likely to be relatively strong. Eponyms may be used as a proxy for contacts of the author if the contextual information is taken into account.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.