Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2017 December 29

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December 29

Absorption (skin) article

The article let's me wondering: why is the skin impermeable to water? How would absorption differ for seawater and fresh water? Does the lining of the mouth or intestine count as skin (that is, should this go into the article)? Do they behave differently? --Hofhof (talk) 11:54, 29 December 2017 (UTC)

It is not impermeable, it is simply already saturated, given the high amount of water our body keeps in every cell. Cells also have the ability to selectively take up, filter, throw out and keep an inner balance of chemicals, so it should not make a difference how much salt water contains that comes in contact with the skin. --Kharon (talk) 14:29, 29 December 2017 (UTC)

What? -165.234.252.11 (talk) 19:34, 29 December 2017 (UTC)

To actually answer this guy's questions: the impermeability of the skin is thanks to a layer of keratin that composes the outermost part of the skin (see e.g. keratin, human skin, epidermis, stratum corneum), and no, the lining of the mouth and intestine are not skin, they're mucous membranes, and they don't belong in that article. -165.234.252.11 (talk) 19:56, 29 December 2017 (UTC)

• Would the mucous membrane in the intestine absorb water? For example, if there's only seawater available, would pumping this water down there hydrate a human? Isn't that the same as a vodka-soaked tampons (aka Alcohol enema? Is a Seawater enema a thing?--Hofhof (talk) 22:41, 29 December 2017 (UTC)

Sea water is hypertonic compared to human blood, and pumping it into the intestine would suck water out of the body, causing dehydration, diarrhea, and death. μηδείς (talk) 02:23, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

See osmosis - to desalinate water requires the input of energy in some well engineered process. The body can do it to a limited degree (and does so in the loop of Henle for example) but is not evolved to be able to do it to the extent of being able to use seawater. Wnt (talk) 11:39, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

Year of description of a new species

Good morning/afternoon/evening. This article describes Varalphadon janetae sp. nov. As you can see, it is due to be published in the April 2018 issue of Cretaceous Research, but it has been available on ScienceDirect since last month.

Since the ICZN Code recognises electronic publication for species described after 1 January 2012, should the authority of this taxon be cited as "Carneiro, 2017" or "Carneiro, 2018"? In other words, should we use the date on which the journal carried the article or the actual date when it was published online? Thanks.--Leptictidium (mt) 12:49, 29 December 2017 (UTC)

Articles should not use commercial sources like Sciencedirect, Elsevier and alike, which are definitely not freely available, not even in university libraries. See WP:Identifying reliable sources#Vendor and e-commerce sources The journals from these companies usually are tho. So best use the journal reference. --Kharon (talk) 14:14, 29 December 2017 (UTC)

Neither Sciencedirect nor Elsevier are vendor and e-commerce sources and the guideline that you cited is not applicable to them. Ruslik_Zero 19:40, 29 December 2017 (UTC)

I don't know what you mean by 'not even in university'. Lots of universities have access to Elsevier. In the same way that Wikipedia editors have access to it: [1].--Hofhof (talk) 22:44, 29 December 2017 (UTC)

• The answer to the original question is that you should use the date assigned to the article by the journal, because any other approach would lead to unacceptable confusion. Looie496 (talk) 20:24, 29 December 2017 (UTC)

Sorry, but this is incorrect in general. Often the date printed in the journal predates when a journal was printed (because of publication delays), or may postdate when an author distributed reprints. The date of publication to be used is "the earliest day on which the work is demonstrated to be in existence as a published work". For that reason the library stamps on journal issues indicating when they were received can be important historical evidence about priority in taxonomy. For zoology, the relevant part of the ICZN code is Chapter 5 (http://www.iczn.org/iczn/index.jsp). Jmchutchinson (talk) 16:04, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

• It only took a moment to search out the ICZN rule change you mentioned at [2] - article 9.9 explicitly says that electronic pre-publication doesn't count. This is an arbitrary decision; however understandable the choice may be, there was no way to decide it from first principles. Wnt (talk) 11:36, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

• It is not quite that simple, but depends on whether the electronic pre-publication is the “version of record”, that is the final version, which will be identical to the printed version. If the electronic version may be updated prior to printing on paper, the rules are clear according to the ICZN: "21.8.3. Some works are accessible online in preliminary versions before the publication date of the final version. Such advance electronic access does not advance the date of publication of a work, as preliminary versions are not published (Article 9.9)." For the botanical code, the rules are very similar (http://www.iapt-taxon.org/nomen/main.php?page=art30).

However, if the electronic version is identical to the later printed version, and especially if the publisher designates it as the version of record, then my understanding is that the date of publication is that of this electronic version. I think to remember that it is not considered important whether an electronic version of record includes the page numbers of the printed version. For instance, the respected taxonomic journal ZooKeys writes (https://zookeys.pensoft.net/about): "The journal publishes electronic versions of the articles when these are ready to publish, without delays that might be caused by completion of an issue. These electronic versions are not "pre-prints" but final and immutable (Version of Record), hence available for the purposes of biological nomenclature. The date indicated on the electronic version is to be considered the actual publication date." Jmchutchinson (talk) 14:29, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

Good catch! I am more accustomed to sections like this, which I think are clearly excluded by the policy, but you give a perfect example to the contrary. Wnt (talk) 15:14, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

• Wikipedia is a tertiary source. We don't need to worry about establishing priority, etc. That is someone else's problem. In so far as we actually need to discuss disputes about priority that ought to be done by citing secondary sources that discuss the issue. However, that does not appear to be the crux of the question being asked. The OP seems to be asking what is the correct way to cite: [3]. Our goal is to provide a clear citation to allow others, including those without internet access, to find the paper. For that purpose, I agree with the comment above that using the date provided by the publisher as it appears on the paper is the only reasonable choice when writing out the citation since that is the natural way that someone would look up the paper. So, I would write the full citation as :

Carneiro, Leonardo M. (April 2018). "A new species of Varalphadon (Mammalia, Metatheria, Sparassodonta) from the upper Cenomanian of southern Utah, North America: Phylogenetic and biogeographic insights". Cretaceous Research. 84: 88–96. doi:10.1016/j.cretres.2017.11.004. Retrieved December 30, 2017.

Giving any other date for the paper than the publisher's date of April 2018 seems likely to make it harder to find. Then, if one is giving a short reference to this citation, I would say "Carneiro, 2018" is the way to go. Dragons flight (talk) 21:44, 30 December 2017 (UTC)

You misinterpret the original question. The issue is not how to cite an article in Wikipedia or in another publication but how to write the "taxonomic authority". You will be familiar with the Latin binomial name given to every species, but the full scientific name includes a reference to the original description; for instance "Rattus norvegicus (Berkenhout, 1769)". See Author citation (botany) and Author citation (zoology). It is often a requirement to quote the name in full including the taxonomic authority (author and date) at the first mention of a species in a scientific article, so that readers can be sure which species is being referred to (another author, or even the same one, might later have used the same name to refer to another species). Except in some taxonomic papers, the full bibliographic details of such works are not routinely listed in the reference section. But it is important to follow the formal rules of which date to use for the taxonomic authority. One reason is so that everybody uses the same date in this context; otherwise it appears that two different species might have been described using the same name. A second reason is that this date is the criterion deciding what name has priority: if two publications described the same species, it is the one with the earlier date that is valid. You would be doing nobody any favours by writing a non-standard date here, even if it might make it easier to find the original publication. And according to the formal internationally agreed rules of scientific nomenclature, it is simply wrong.

In other situations when citing publications, cases of dates written in publications not matching their actual date of publication are often dealt with by writing both dates with one in square brackets, and perhaps using inverted commas. There seems to be considerable variation between journals in how this is done. But, to re-emphasise the main point, including both dates like this and using square brackets are explicitly not allowed when including the taxonomic authority in the formal name. Jmchutchinson (talk) 09:24, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

Perhaps Leptictidium would like to clarify. I agree the question is ambiguous, but the context still suggests to me that he is asking how "we" (as Wikipedians) should state the citation and taxonomic authority. If instead he is asking how he should state it in some other context (a journal article he is writing perhaps?), then the answer might be different. I stand by my answer as it comes to Wikipedia. I believe that a Wikipeidian who is citing this paper when referencing the creation of this species should also give the paper's corresponding date in any statement of authority (i.e. Carneiro, 2018). To be explicit, to the extent there is an interpretation of ICZN rules that might be read to give a different statement of authority, then in my opinion that should be ignored on Wikipedia as long as the only source is the paper itself. A) It is likely to create confusion if the full citation and the short authority statement disagree, B) it isn't Wikipedia's job to decide such issues of priority, and C) the interpretation of ICZN rules arguably requires original research. If some later review article or other source assigned a different taxonomic authority (e.g. "Carneiro 2017"), then Wikipedia could cite the later source when stating the authority. In the absence of such a third-party clarification though, and when the only source provided is the paper itself, I believe the reasonable course is for Wikipedia to treat the information as it would other citations and use the publisher's date. Dragons flight (talk) 19:21, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

Sorry for not making the question clear enough. Indeed, I am not asking how to cite the paper, but how to write the taxonomic authority. Based on the above answers, since the version available on Sciencedirect seems not to be the full article, merely a short advance extract, I'm inclined to go for "Carneiro, 2018". Thanks everyone for your valuable feedback.--Leptictidium (mt) 19:35, 31 December 2017 (UTC)

• The pdf of the full version of this particular article is behind a paywall, to which I have no free access. However, it does appear to be available. With reference to the issue in which this article appears, the journal web site (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/01956671/84/supp/C) states that "This issue is In Progress but contains articles that are final and fully citable." That implies that the electronic version is the version of record, and so the authority should be Carneiro 2017. My opinion is that there is here no freedom of choice about how to write the taxonomic authority correctly. But if you cite the article, you can write Carneiro (2017 [“2018”]), or something similar, to clarify the situation. I agree that this is an unfortunate circumstance, but presumably not such an unusual one nowadays. However, it is routine in old literature that printed publication dates do not reflect reality, and taxonomists are very used to dealing with that situation appropriately, so that the consequent mismatch of dates is thus not so surprising to professionals. Nowadays in some journals the final printed pdfs make clear the date of online publication, which is good practice. Jmchutchinson (talk) 21:16, 31 December 2017 (UTC)