It is not a question of whether professionals or amateurs are writing them or whether the papers are published in peer-reviewed journals or not. Many so-called amateur journals are edited by knowledgeable herpetologists, and the papers submitted are quality checked as well as high quality. Regardless of where a paper may be published, sometimes the material on which a new taxon is based is so poorly preserved or fragmentary (in case of fossils) that it is difficult to determine whether the names attached to such material is valid or not.



Restricting publication of taxonomic papers to peer-reviewed journals is not a panacea. There are plenty of taxonomic proposals published in peer-reviewed journals with which I disagree strongly. Quite often these are written by molecular systematists with cladistic ideology. The taxa they delimit cannot be easily defined or are undefinable simply because molecules evolve independently of morphology and because cladistically delimited taxa do not take into account morphological disparity or similarities. This can present problems in groups in which there are different rates of evolutionary change. Slowly changing species as a group are often paraphyletic with respect to faster evolving species. Yet these slowly evolving species which closely resemble each other and their common ancestor are often splintered into different genera in order to avoid recognizing paraphyletic taxa. The result are poorly defined taxa that make for controversial taxonomic proposals.



Evidence-free or poorly conceived taxonomic proposals are not by any means restricted to amateur publications, in contrast there are some quite sophisticated taxonomic papers published in so-called amateur journals by grad students and seasoned herpetologists alike. There is no simple line that can be drawn to distinguish so-called "amateur" journals from peer-reviewed journals. Try instead to verify the facts and do not assume that the peer-review process is a substitution for the independent verification of the facts presented. It is not.

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