Standard measures of academic performance — such as impact factor of the journals one publishes in, and an author’s H index — are based on citations. Does this disadvantage taxonomy, as some have argued (e.g., “Why impact factors don’t work for taxonomy” doi:10.1038/415957a), because the discipline publishes many paper in small, low impact factor journals? Some taxonomists feel that their work receives fewer citations that it deserves. Kevin Zelnio (among others) argues that ecologists and other biologists rarely cite taxonomic work related to their study organisms. If they did then Johann Wilhelm Meigen’s 1830 book “Systematische Beschreibung der bekannten europaischen zweiflugeligen Insekten” which describes the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster (the subject of A fly by any other name), among others, would be one of the most highly cited works in biology.

Or does this overstate things? Eugene Garfield has argued that taxonomy has its “rock stars” (“Taxonomy is small, but it has its citation classics”, doi:10.1038/35093267), and if we include phylogenetics (building evolutionary trees) in taxonomy, then the top five most highly cited papers in evolutionary biology authored in Europe where all on “taxonomy” (How to succeed in evolutionary biology, without really trying).

Can we imagine other ways of measuring the impact of taxonomic work, perhaps by expanding citation metrics to include data as well as papers. Elsewhere I have argued (doi:10.1093/bib/bbn022, free preprint at hdl:10101/npre.2008.1760.1) that we can think of citation networks that include publications, DNA sequences, images, and specimens. Adding taxonomic names to this might help us get a better idea of the “impact” of taxonomic research.