Taxonomy and Irreproducible Biological Science

Scientific research is supposed to be reproducible, and when that research is published, a methods section is included that provides the details of how it can be repeated or expanded on. Biologists fail regularly in one aspect of reproducibility: taxonomy. In one recent study, Bortolus (2008) found that in a sample of 80 articles published in peer-reviewed ecology journals, 50 did not provide “any supporting information justifying or guaranteeing the correct identification of the organisms studied or manipulated” (p. 114). Usually, there is enough detail in almost all other parts of the methods section, but in order for their work to be truly repeatable, biologists should explain how they identified the species that are included in their study. This is not an onerous task, and it can usually be facilitated by the inclusion of one or more taxonomic references that were used to identify the species in question. Taxonomic identifications need not always be morphologically based but could instead rely on DNA-sequence data, preferably linked to sound taxonomic research (Dexter et al. 2010).