Nomenclator Zoologicus is one of the major compendia in the field of zoological nomenclature, compiled by Sheffield Airey Neave and his successors and published in 9 volumes over the period 1939–1994, under the auspices of the Zoological Society of London; a tenth, electronic-only volume was also produced before the project ceased. It contains over 340,000 published name instances with their authorities and details of their original publication, certain nomenclatural notes and cross references, and an indication of the taxonomic group to which each is assigned. An electronic version of volumes 1-10 was released online by the uBio project, based at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Woods Hole, in 2004–2005.
Scope
The following statement regarding the scope of the enterprise is contained in Neave's Foreword to the initial volume, and is worth quoting in full:
Initial publication history
The concept for Neave's initial work was devised in 1934, with the actual work of compilation taking place over the period 1935–1939. The cost of compilation was quoted as £1,800 in the funds of the day, which was provided by the Zoological Society of London, with printing costs covered by New York's Carnegie Corporation, the U.K. Royal Society and an anonymous donor. The initial compendium, entitled "Nomenclator Zoologicus; a list of the names of genera and subgenera in zoology from the Tenth Edition of Linnaeus, 1758, to the end of 1935", was issued in four volumes covering alphabetical portions A-C, D-L, M-P and Q-Z over the period 1939–1940, containing in excess of 225,000 published generic and subgeneric names. Volume 5, a supplement covering the period 1936–1945, was issued in 1950, followed by volume 6 in 1966, volume 7 in 1975, volume 8 in 1993, and volume 9 in 1996. A tenth, electronic-only volume, covering names from 1995 to 2004, was also produced by Thomson Reuters, compilers of the Zoological Record, and made available to the compilers of the digital version at the Marine Biological Laboratory/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Library, Woods Hole.
Genera versus subgenera
In the initial 8 volumes of the published work, no distinction is made between genera and subgenera; this discrepancy was addressed in volumes 9 and 10, with names proposed as subgenera identified as such.
Digitised version
With the approval of the original publishers and financial support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, the uBio project, based at the Marine Biological Laboratory/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Library in Woods Hole, U.S.A., undertook a project to digitise the printed volumes 1-9 of Nomenclator Zoologicus, to which was added content from the electronic volume 10, which made available on the internet in 2004–2005. Access to the digitised version is available via http://ubio.org/NomenclatorZoologicus/. It is stated as containing 340,000 genera as represented in the text as well as approximately 3000 supplemental corrections. The content has been converted into a database structure and is sorted into structured fields which can be searched together or individually; any name that is retrieved as the result of a user search can be traced back to a scanned image of the page from which it derives. Key benefits arising from the conversion of the content into digital form include the ability for a user to search across all original volumes simultaneously, the provision of search via the internet from any desktop, and the potential mobilisation of the data into the broader arena of biodiversity informatics including its availability for re-use and enhancement by other projects.
Data ongoing use
As digital data, entries from Neave's work continue to be incorporated in modern digital compilations, augmented in some cases with additional information such as present family allocation, nomenclatural or taxonomic status, and more.
Simple cases (single cited original publication instance)
As an example of the simplest case, the first entry in volume 1 of the original work reads In the uBio digitised version, this has become record #1 ; it has also been ported into IRMNG, the Interim Register of Marine and Nonmarine Genera, where it is record #1157780, and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility taxonomic backbone, where it is record #4741596. In the IRMNG record, the name is noted as a possible misspelling of Aages Barovskiĭ, 1926 and is assigned to the family Coccinellidae, which is an enhancement from the original Nomenclator allocation which is simply "Col".
Compound cases (multiple cited original publication instances)
According to the compilers, in some cases it was unclear in which publication the name was definitely established, so multiple instances can be listed, for example: In other cases, the earliest known publication was deemed by the compilers to be a nomen nudum, resulting in an entry such as the following: In the first of these cases, in the absence of other information, data has been ported into subsequent systems presuming that the earliest cited published instance is valid, i.e. this name is then cited as Aades Schoenherr, 1823. In the second case, the distinction between the unavailable and validly published instance is important both nomenclaturally and taxonomically, and so two records have been created based on the single Nomenclator entry, namely one for Ablabera Dejean, 1833 plus another for Ablabera Erichson, 1847. From the above examples it is clear that, although lacking some desirable supplementary information, the set of over 340,000 original Nomenclator records provides a huge foundation upon which subsequent biodiversity informatics initiatives have built further. An additional usage of the Nomenclator Zoologicus dataset is in the form of a mapping performed by Rod Page between records in the Nomenclator and records in the Index to Organism Namesoperated byClarivate Analytics, to DOIs, and to bibliographic databases such as the Biodiversity Heritage Library and BioStor.
Data availability
The original uBio database file used as base data for the R. Page cross mapped version cited above is accessible via the URL https://github.com/rdmpage/nomenclator-zoologicus/tree/master/data. A "cleaned" and extended version of the data is incorporated in the IRMNG genera dataset which is accessible via http://www.irmng.org/download.php.
Namesakes
A previous Nomenclator Zoologicus was published by Louis Agassiz in 1842, and another work with the same title by Samuel Hubbard Scudder in 1882, however in the twentieth century and today the name "Nomenclator Zoologicus" is most commonly employed for Neave's compilation.
