ArticlePloS one2014
Taxamatch, an algorithm for near ('fuzzy') matching of scientific names in taxonomic databases.
Article in PloS one, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Celtic Invasive Plants database.Scientific data · 2026Article
- A scalable exemplar-based method for aligning biological taxonomies.Biodiversity data journal · 2026Article
- How similar are species names and why does this matter for biodiversity data.Biodiversity data journal · 2026Article
- Open-Source Marine Biodiversity Data Quality in the Norwegian Sea Spanning 149 Years: Knowledge Gaps in the Deep-Sea Mining Opening Area.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- PNSS: An online plant name service system.Biodiversity data journal · 2025Article
- Vertical and horizontal environmental DNA (eDNA) patterns of fish in a shallow and well-mixed North Sea area.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
- PhyloSophos: a high-throughput scientific name mapping algorithm augmented with explicit consideration of taxonomic science, and its application on natural product (NP) occurrence database processing.BMC bioinformatics · 2023Article
- PhyloMatcher: a tool for resolving conflicts in taxonomic nomenclature.Bioinformatics advances · 2023Article
- Article
- Match Algorithms for Scientific Names in FlorItaly, the Portal to the Flora of Italy.Plants (Basel, Switzerland) · 2021Article
- Soft Bigram distance for names matching.PeerJ. Computer science · 2021Article
- WorldFlora: An R package for exact and fuzzy matching of plant names against the World Flora Online taxonomic backbone data.Applications in plant sciences · 2020Article
- Solr-Plant: efficient extraction of plant names from text.BMC bioinformatics · 2019Article
- Annotated checklist for stony corals of American Sāmoa with reference to mesophotic depth records.ZooKeys · 2019Article
- COPIOUS: A gold standard corpus of named entities towards extracting species occurrence from biodiversity literature.Biodiversity data journal · 2019Article
- Article
- A story of data won, data lost and data re-found: the realities of ecological data preservation.Biodiversity data journal · 2018Article
- Constructing a biodiversity terminological inventory.PloS one · 2017Article
- Two Influential Primate Classifications Logically Aligned.Systematic biology · 2016Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Misspellings of organism scientific names create barriers to optimal storage and organization of biological data, reconciliation of data stored under different spelling variants of the same name, and appropriate responses from user queries to taxonomic data systems. This study presents an analysis of the nature of the problem from first principles, reviews some available algorithmic approaches, and describes Taxamatch, an improved name matching solution for this information domain. Taxamatch employs a custom Modified Damerau-Levenshtein Distance algorithm in tandem with a phonetic algorithm, together with a rule-based approach incorporating a suite of heuristic filters, to produce improved levels of recall, precision and execution time over the existing dynamic programming algorithms n-grams (as bigrams and trigrams) and standard edit distance. Although entirely phonetic methods are faster than Taxamatch, they are inferior in the area of recall since many real-world errors are non-phonetic in nature. Excellent performance of Taxamatch (as recall, precision and execution time) is demonstrated against a reference database of over 465,000 genus names and 1.6 million species names, as well as against a range of error types as present at both genus and species levels in three sets of sample data for species and four for genera alone. An ancillary authority matching component is included which can be used both for misspelled names and for otherwise matching names where the associated cited authorities are not identical.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.