Two Simple Ways to Make Taxonomic Diagnoses More Useful

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

See attached Word document

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

I have made all the suggested edits - in the tracked ms for this reviewer highlighted in yellow - with the exception of the following (note that the lack of spaces in the abstract resulted from transferring text from word to PDF - they were originally paragraph breaks that got lost):

line 29 - I did not add the time period as it was not the same as the 18 months used here - to increase the sample size it was two years

line 89 - I did not add numbers of papers not having diagnoses because this is a complex issue with diagnosis-like statements of various forms and subheadings (sometimes multiple types for a single genus) and incorporating the details sufficienty to explain it would disrupt the flow. A full treatment of this issue is in preparation.

I am most grateful for the careful comments - which caught several issues that had eluded me. I agree with the comments wrt references - but it is the journal style.......

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

ICZN Article 13.1.1 does require all new taxa to include "a description or definition that states in words characters that are purported to differentiate the taxon". It is misleading to claim that there is only a recommendation in the Code as to how to recognize a taxon. The distinction between stating characters that differentiate a taxon (which is mandatory) versus a diagnosis (which is not) is very subtle, and should be explained rather than overlooked. At the very least a statement along the lines of "While Article 13.1.1 of the ICZN does require that the description of a new taxon must include a statement giving characters that are used to differentiate it, those characters are not required to be presented in the form of a diagnosis; this is only a recommendation." Table 1 contains several entries for family as only "Staph" - elsewhere in the same table, "Staphylinidae" is spelled in full. Cecidomyiidae is misspelled as "Cecidymyiidae" and "Cecidyomyiidae" in the table, and Mutillidae as "Mutilidae", and Lepismatidae as "Lepidmatidae", and Metarbelidae as "Metarbellidae". "Melolonthidae" is almost universally considered a subfamily of Scarabaeidae, and "Malachiidae" a subfamily of Melyridae. Line 271: "]" missing after "[221".

Author Response

I am grateful to the reviewer for these corrections - they have all been made with blue highlights in the tracked version so they can be detected - though I changed a few "staph" to "Staphylinidae" before turning tracking on.  I trust my comment wrt Article 13.1.1 is now acceptable.

Thank you

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Nice paper and well needed to clarify concepts regarding they way diagnoses should be prepared.
Only a few comments:
- Line 12 - A space is missing in "paper.For".
- Line 19 - a space is missing in "four.I make".

- Line 193 - Maybe I'm just not so bright, but I find the figure caption a bit hard to understand.
- I wonder if the author thought about other potential graphics that could explain further points of their revision of literature that they include in their findings and discussion.

I look forward to see this contribution being public.

 

Best

Author Response

Thank you for your comments, the required changes have been made - with the figure legend edit in green highlights in the tracked document. 

I have added an extra figure which also elicited an interesting conclusion which is added to the manuscript - see figure 2 and associated text (tracked). A similar figure could incorporate the data where sources other than the paper describing new genera were included - but that would extend the horizontal axis to 28000 and would be difficult to follow even if plotted as a logarithm.