Knowledge linked to museum specimen vouchers: measuring scientific production from a major biological collection in Colombia

Abstract

Biological collections are sources of knowledge, particularly critical to understand life when they house specimens from megadiverse countries. However, the scientific value of biological collections is usually unknown because the lack of an explicit link between knowledge and specimens. Here we compiled 628 papers from 152 journals that used collection objects from the Colecciones Biológicas del Instituto de Investigación de Recursos Biológicos Alexander von Humboldt, Colombia (IAvH-CB) as sources. The compilation was largely based on expert knowledge. However, to assess the performance of our method we compared our results with results obtained conducting automatic searches in academic databases. We calculated different metrics and depicted geographical, taxonomic, and bibliometric trends. We found that geographic coverage of the IAvH-CB objects used in the studies is largely regional or national. Taxonomically, we found records of 176 families in 61 orders of taxa, but there is large variation among the number of studies in different groups. The bibliometric analyses indicated that there is a growing trend in the number of publications and citations over the years, and that the citation number as well as the H index of this set of papers is comparable to the knowledge produced by major researchers in Colombia and of similar magnitude to that of the production of relatively small or medium sized collections in the USA. The compilation method used performed well, with broad coverage and an omission rate below 8%, compared with automated searches. However, we conclude that both approaches, expert knowledge and automated searches, are complementary. IAvH-CB are a massive source of scientific knowledge about Colombian biodiversity and they are instrumental for documenting basic issues about taxa in the country.