Hello,
I have been coming across this issue, when trying to ‘add’ a taxon node. Both via a collection object form, and via the taxon-node form.
When I search for the genus, it just isn’t there. I think it should be the first default value in the drop-down search result, but I can’t see it there at all. In this case, here is the top of the list:
Here is the bottom:
And as far as I can tell, I have to an advanced search to ‘see and select’ it.
I don’t ‘think’ it behaves this way ALL the time, but I have definitely observed it several times, but haven’t noted a pattern.
Thanks!
Heather
ps. I have tried with/without space at the end, but wait a sec! I tried not completing the word and here it is! I think if I had a space at the end, it didn’t work?
It seems that the sort is mixing author-names and taxon names? Not sure the logic here, but I think is most effective to have the genus result at the top, not sorted by author.
@HeatherC I do not have author information in my tree and do not see this issue so would assume that it has something to do with that. I do agree that this list should sort by taxon rank and then alphabetically.
It wouldn’t be SO bad if Linnaeus actually named everything, but for some genera, even scrolling to ‘L.’ takes a while.
I hope that this can be tweaked to display the genus node/taxon at the top of the list. Or actually, whatever the highest rank of your search term. So if you were typing ‘Aste…’, the first result would be Asteraceae, then Aster, then Aster … species, regardless of whether any of the taxa have author included.
From my perspective, no real requirement to have the author field included in the sort, and including them in a search means you get no result at all…
Hi,
We find that the genus is consistently alphabetical in where it occurs in the results, as Andy says I think that this is caused by the authors being included in the names displayed.
It would be fantastic if the results were sorted by rank as suggested above - it is often difficult to find the genus without having to look up who the author is first.
@HeatherC @RDrinkwater I realize this is a very late reply to this thread, but I didn’t see it back in 2023. I noticed this problem myself, and there is an easy-ish solution we have employed:
If you change the default formatting of the genus rank (and other higher taxon ranks) such that the authority only displays at and below species, the genus name sorts alphabetically at the top of the list. (Well, we use “contains” for our searches, and do not search the authority field in the taxon combobox, only the Genus+Species+Infraspecific taxon combination, so it’s usually somewhere a little beneath the top of the list, but the genus name always sorts above taxa within the genus.)
It’s also visually shorter, which is easier to pick out.
I initially discovered this fix because I hate the way “Genus (Authority)” looks when specimens are identified to genus level alone. e.g. I don’t need “Lampsilis Rafinesque, 1820”, or “Lampsilis sp. Rafinesque, 1820” I only ever want “Lampsilis sp.” I do like having the authority for species-group taxa, just because there are so many homonyms among mollusks and the genera change a LOT.
Hope this is helpful to someone!
Great insights! Will have to investigate further! Thanks!
Hi @nfshoobs
Thanks for sharing this fix, however for us the author is a key part to being able to know which genus is the one to be using. We have many instances of the same Genus being in the database with differing authors. These names were all published, and may have been used on specimens, so need to be available in the database.
@rdrinkwater sorry to hear that, I suspect this will be true for many Botanical collections because your name authorities are tied to concepts in a way that zoological name authorities aren’t, right?
This really underpins, I think, the need for global preferences for multilevel sorting of querycombobox menu items from any table in the DB. Then you could say, sort by taxon fullname then by author.
I do wonder if you could do something tricky with adding whitespaces to genus names and then changing the formatting of a full scientificname to not include a leading whitespace, thereby forcing genera to the top of the sort even with their authorities because a double whitespace would come before a whitespace+letter. But that may be more trouble than it’s worth.
Hopefully the trick I posted first will be helpful to some zoological collections at least!
