Talk:Deroceras invadens

Rae

Hello @Jmchutchinson: There are several things wrong with this. WP:PRIMARY-BIO is an essay which contradicts WP:V & WP:OR. Additionally Rae is a Short Communication. Worst is the fact that Rae has not been published. The existence of an advance manuscript does not change the fact that it hasn't been published yet. Invasive Spices (talk) 22:55, 15 February 2023 (UTC)

@Invasive Spices:, thank you for getting back to discuss this; maybe I should have contacted you already on your talk page. To explain to others, this concerns your removal of the last paragraph of the Behaviour section, which I restored, with a brief justification in the edit summary to which you have here responded. You now raise several issues.

(1) Rae (2023) is indeed labelled a Short Communication, but this means little more than that the article is short. The refereeing process concerning the quality of the science will be as strict as for full-length articles in the journal. Judging by the custom with other journals, this category of article may be processed more quickly or an article that is less important (but still valid) may have a better chance of being accepted.

(2) If I click on the DOI link, the final article is there in full, so I would consider it published. It appears in the March 2023 issue of the journal, about which the journal says "This issue is in progress but contains articles that are final and fully citable." The journal also has a section online of articles that are "in press" and not the final version, which might be what you mean by "advance manuscript", but the Rae article is past this stage. In technical terms, what one sees now is the version of record and for most purposes (e.g. priority in taxonomy) the critical publication date is considered to be when that goes online, not when the printed version appears or even when the full issue appears online.

(3) You claim that WP:PRIMARY-BIO is an essay which contradicts WP:V & WP:OR. I have not checked whether this is true but, if I have convinced you now that the Rae (2023) article is published, presumably verifiability and original research is no longer an issue here.

(4) Actually, you originally cited WP:PRIMARY, which is policy, and it was from that that I cited a sentence: "Primary sources that have been reputably published may be used". We all know that it says more, about using them with care and not analysing the results further yourself, and that secondary sources are preferable, etc. But nothing contradicts the original statement that I have quoted. There is an agreement in medical Wikipedia articles not to use primary sources, which is practicable because there are so many review articles in medicine, but this is not the practice with other biological topics. If you look at non-stub Wikipedia articles about more obscure organisms you will find that they necessarily rely extensively on the primary literature because there are not many review articles. For instance, look at the gastropod articles reviewed as Good Articles from this list. However, the introductions of research articles usually review previous work, so in this respect they act as secondary sources. All but the last sentence in the paragraph of concern to you are findings from earlier articles that Rae discusses: so they are supported by a secondary source.

In summary, I believe that it is well within Wikipedia policies, and follows the customs with other similar articles, to incorporate these findings into this article and to use Rae (2023) as the supporting reference. JMCHutchinson (talk) 18:45, 16 February 2023 (UTC)

"may be used" is only barely true. A WP:PRIMARY Short Communication without citations and so recent should not be.

I am unable to find the secondary content in Rae that you refer to. The exception is Deroceras invadens usually avoids areas treated with its parasite Phasmarhabditis hermaphrodita, a nematode which is used commercially to control slugs.. However Rae is "reviewing" own recent work in that case. I think in stead we should WP:CITESELF your https://neobiota.pensoft.net/articles.php?id=4006 for that sentence (assuming the Phasmarhabditis hermaphrodita references say what I think they say).

Anything not covered by WP:SECONDARYs is not covered for a reason. WP:PRIMARY-BIO's position that editors should remedy this by choosing among PRIMARYs would require WP:OR. I am not in your area however if your area is underserved by WP:RS perhaps the length of the article should suit that…

In a similar vein I notice you CITESELFd this Special:Diff/977086387. CITESELF may be appropriate however in this case it was 2 months before publication and 1.5 years later remains without SECONDARY. Invasive Spices (talk) 21:26, 18 February 2023 (UTC)

To answer your last point first, you are mistaken that my citation of my own paper (with COI statement in edit summary) was before its publication. The edit you cite was on 6th Sept. 2020. The OUP website for the article states that it was published on 2nd Sept. 2020, and an email from OUP on 4th Sept. informed me that it was online. The article appeared in the so-called November issue, but, as I discussed in my earlier response, it is the date of the online publication of the version of record that counts.

Statements in the introduction of Rae (2023) that I consider make it a secondary source are: "Wynne et al. (2016) found ... Deroceras invadens ... would also avoid P. hermaphrodita", and "Morris et al. (2018) showed slugs (D. invadens and A. hortensis) infected with P. hermaphrodita moved towards areas where the nematode has been applied". Indeed you are right that Rae himself was one author on those papers, but I can't find any Wikipedia policy stating that that invalidates it as a secondary source; in theory the refereeing process ought to have spotted if the claim and citations were not appropriate.

Both these papers have been cited since by plenty of authors other than Rae, so one could find further secondary sources, but frankly I don't find that worthwhile or helpful, so it is not the sort of editing that I devote my time to. To me the important thing is that there is a reference (primary or secondary) that allows the reader to find out who made the claim and thus to find out more information. That's verifiability. If someone else wants to dig out secondary references to add, they can do so, but a mention in passing by another author does not really provide much additional reassurance about a claim's truth or importance, and the additional reference may distract from the more pertinent primary one. It is relevant to bear in mind that we are rarely dealing with anything controversial on these species pages. Where there is controversy, I agree that secondary sources are of more value.

We evidently have different perspectives about this, probably because we edit in different areas. However, I am confident that it is not against Wikipedia policies to add statements supported only by primary references, even if recent. That seems to be the accepted custom in gastropod articles, including those reviewed as Good Articles. As you can see from the banner above, there is a WikiProject Gastropods whose talk page might provide a better venue to discuss the general issue. JMCHutchinson (talk) 23:36, 18 February 2023 (UTC)