A critical review of the world catalogs of Empidoidea (Insecta: Diptera) by Yang et al. (2006, 2007)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Many in the worldwide Diptera taxonomic community were surprised to see the recent publication of the “World Catalog of Dolichopodidae (Insecta: Diptera)” by Yang, Zhu, Wang & Zhang (2006) and the “World Catalog of Empididae (Insecta: Diptera)” by Yang, Zhang, Yao & Zhang (2007). The rapid completion of both catalogs that together report to cover all of the world’s empidoid diversity, the apparent lack of peer review, and the higher classification schemes adopted in these works, appear to have created considerable scepticism and discussion on the extent of their usefulness by empidoid workers. As O’Hara (2008) recently stated “modern technological advances make it possible for just about anyone to compile names from the Zoological Record, to scan catalogues, and to gather information from secondary sources to produce an unimpressive world catalogue in record time”. In order to accurately assess the value of these two catalogs, especially for current and future users, we provide a critical review that touches on all aspects of these contributions. It is not our intention to give a page by page critique, but instead to provide a summary of the types of errors and omissions (illustrated with examples) we have encountered and to point out the limitations of these catalogs while also indicating which parts are useful in a general sense.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".