Re: Editing guidelines

[Mark Wilden]

Here are some guidelines for adding and editing references in AntCat:

• Please try to provide PDFs along with citations, when available.
• When uploading a new PDF file, remember that the file name should not be random. We adopted the format Phil uses in his PDF library:
  Smith_et_al_2012_Abbreviated_Journal_Title Your subjective abbreviated title
  See recently added references for examples.
  Journal abbreviations follow the ones adopted in the published version of AntBib, Ward et al. 1996. In cases where the journal name is not to be found there, follow the List of Title Word Abbreviations from ISSN.
• Remember to italicize genus and species-group names in titles (you can do this by adding asterisks before and after, e.g. *Tetramorium*).
• Please give both authors' names and titles as given in the original publication (always check with the reprint/file), including original diacritics and, with regard to the title, any taxonomic qualifiers such as "Hymenoptera: Formicidae".
• In the title, use capitals only when required by grammatical usage; all other words in lower case. This means that it is not a good idea to simply copy and paste the title from the reference source, since the principal words are often capitalized.
• Give issue number along with volume number only for journals that start a new pagination with every "issue".
• Remember to mention all the genera in which taxonomic changes are made in the "Taxonomic notes" field.
• We are currently uploading only publications published in print, as only those are considered valid by the ICZN. This means we are currently not including online-early papers.
• When adding a new citation, try to determine the publication date of the printed version. This is given in the "Date" field, in the format year/month/day without the slash marks. For example, 13th July 2012 would be 20120713.
• Look for nested citations, i.e. cases where a portion of the paper (often a taxonomic description) has authorship that differs from that of the paper as a whole. We are citing these separately. For example, see Lacau, S.; Groc, S.; Dejean, A.; Oliveira, M. L. de; Delabie, J. H. C. 2012 (an enclosing reference) and Lacau and Groc, in Lacau, Groc, et al., 2012 (a nested reference inside the enclosing reference).