Species synonyms: How important are they for the retrieval of ethnobotanical information?

Abstract

Background: The synonyms of the currently accepted scientific names are binomial names used to designate the same taxon, now in disuse due to the nomenclatural rules. We explore the evolution of the synonymy in the useful palm genus Euterpe to investigate if the inclusion of the synonyms affects the recovery of information on the uses and vernacular names. Materials and Methods: We used three search engines (Google Scholar, Scopus and Web of Science) to recover papers associated with the currently accepted scientific names of the Euterpe palms and the forty associated synonyms. Then we examined the information recovered on the uses and vernacular names to compare the outcomes. Results: Our results evidence the increase in the recovery of ethnobotanical information (11.1%) and vernacular names (17.8%) when the synonyms are used. Recently described species had less synonyms than their early-described counterparts. In addition, our results revealed that the more useful Euterpe species had more vernacular names. Conclusions: The accurate identification of the synonyms for accepted species facilitates and improves the recovery of information by increasing the amount of material retrieved from the web. As expected, most useful palms have more vernacular names. Google Scholar has shown the better performance using synonyms, but the outcomes for the currently accepted scientific names were similar for the three search engines.