Gogo Sites

Long, John A., 2016, Quantifying scientific significance of a fossil site: the Gogo Fossil sites (Late Devonian, Western Australia) as a case study, Memoirs of Museum Victoria 74, pp. 5-15 : 8-9

Gogo Sites : Actual Measures of Scientific Significance

The premise of this work implies that the diversity of a fauna is reflected in the numbers of papers on the fauna, and the numbers of pages of peer-reviewed publications. Works of monographic stature indicate seminal papers that are widely cited as the key reference for the study group (e.g., Gardiner’s 1984 monograph on Gogo actinopterygians has 250 citations). Thus sites of high scientific significance would be expected to generate not only a lot of papers, but large descriptive papers and therefore highly cited papers. Large monographic works are amongst some of the most highly cited works in palaeontology, and on-line journals like Paleontologia Electronica still publish such works without charge to authors. A good measure for the total significance of a body of work centred around a topic is the cumulative impact factor points of the journals they have been published in. The academic website ResearchGate uses this approach by adding up the impact factor points for an individual’s body of work to give a total tally. Using this approach we find that the Gogo sites have an impact factor points tally of around 611. The method used in the scoring was to assign low ranking journals (IF=0-1) as a score of 1, and then round up or down any other impact factors to the nearest whole numbers.

Assessing very significant fossil specimens. A fossil that solves a major evolutionary problem or bridges a major morphological boundary as a key transitional form will attract high numbers of citations. For example the discovery of Tiktaalik , which was found to be the immediate ancestor of all living tetrapods, was published in the journal N ature as two back-to-back articles in April 2006 (it was also the cover story). To date these two papers on Tiktaalik , now one of the most well-known and iconic fossil discoveries of the 20 th century, have received 255 citations (Daeschler et al., 2006) and 188 citations (Shubin et al., 2006) respectively. Yet a third paper on Tiktaalik , also published in Nature (Downes et al., 2008), has only received 25 citations. Another example is the discovery of Homo floresiensis , the socalled ‘hobbit’. The initial paper announcing the discovery by Brown et al. (2004) in Nature has now received around 609 citations. Using these as a reasonable basis for comparison, we see that the Gogo fauna’s most highly cited descriptive papers (Miles, 1977, 188 citations; Gardiner, 1984, 250 citations), though not published in high impact journals, still yield high citations directly comparable to the original Tiktaalik papers.

Very High Impact Papers. One measure of the international significance of fossil specimens is whether they are valuable in solving a major phylogenetic or biogeographic problem, or provide new information about evolutionary biology deemed highly significant. In such cases the work is occasionally accepted in the highest ranking interdisciplinary science journals like Nature or Science. Of course, this is not always the case as some very significant discoveries get routinely rejected by such journals. Nonetheless, as these journals publish only a handful of palaeontological papers each year (e.g., Nature published about 10 palaeontological papers in 2014), each paper is judged to be a highly significant breakthrough worthy of high impact publication by both the board of editors and reviewers of these papers. These are thus here given special attention as ‘very high impact papers’ (impact factor as of 2013> 30; Nature, IF=42; Science IF=31).

A measure of international significance for a site can therefore be also gauged by the total number of very high impact papers ( VHIP) published on its fossil materials. For the Gogo sites , this amounts to 10 such papers (9 on primary materials, plus one review paper on the site’s significance, Ahlberg, 1989; see Supplementary Appendix 1). This is more VHIPs than any other fossil site in Australia (for comparison, Riversleigh World Heritage fossil mammal site has 4 VHIPs, Victoria’s Early Cretaceous vertebrate sites have 4 VHIPs, Ediacara c. 3 VHIPs). Excluding African hominid sites, the only other fossil sites in the world that immediately come to mind to have 10 or more VHIPs published on their faunas would include the Jehol Biota of China (Liaoning sites, covering a very wide range of sites and stratigraphic horizons), and the Burgess Shale sites in Canada.

Numbers of papers/pages published. This gives an overall estimate of the quantity, but not quality, of peer-reviewed work published from a site. Naturally a large number of papers reflect either a diverse fauna, or that continuous new data is being described from a site. This suggests the site hasn’t yet peaked in terms of yielding scientifically significant new specimens. In some cases work might be published as a series of monographs, which limits the overall numbers of papers published but increases the total number of pages of published work. For Gogo this is a large number: 4389 pages. This excludes any books that are not specifically on the Gogo fossil fauna. This doesn’t include papers on the geology of the site, but only papers that primarily describe Gogo fossils (fishes plus invertebrates and microfossils) or figure Gogo specimens in elucidating the descriptions of other early vertebrate specimens.