Biodiversity as a recognised concept has only existed for the past 15 years or so, but its importance is reflected by the huge amount of literature that has been published in that time, to the extent that it would be impossible to have a fully comprehensive bibliographic treatment in one volume. The size of the literature indicates the importance of the subject. Human beings, or at least some of the more responsible of them, have at last come to realise the wealth of the world’s biodiversity and how fast it is being lost through the actions of irresponsible and corrupt governments, monoculture agriculture and greedy national and global businesses. The implications of such losses are huge and undoubtedly far more than we know as species are being lost before they have even been recognised.
This book, however, is not looking at the facts of biodiversity but is an attempt to organise the literature and review many of the facets of study of the subject. The emphasis is on the primary literature concerning the investigation of biodiversity, its measurement, understanding, monitoring and preservation. It does not cover such things as floras and faunas, nor basic biology. Neither does it offer directory type information on organisations or individuals involved in biodiversity‐related studies. Individual papers in the several hundred edited collections are excluded from individual consideration and the bibliography is confined almost exclusively to the English language. There are no electronic sources listed and other exclusions are theses, book reviews, news items, reference works or juvenile literature.
Despite all these exclusions, there are some 5,700 entries arranged by author. The bibliographic citation is in shortened form but the entries do contain brief annotations and/or a list of descriptive added terms. These terms can be looked up in the subject index which will point the reader to other items on the same topic. Items have been chosen on the basis of their high bibliometric ratings which is taken as an indication of their worth and the rating for each item is given.
The main bibliography is followed by a second covering about 165 important journals in the field and there are three indexes dealing with general subjects, geographical and animal and plant groups. The indexes refer only to the number of items considered relevant and it is therefore necessary to look up each one and decide from the title how relevant it actually is to the user’s own search, something that every librarian who has done much searching of abstracts is familiar with.
Like most of the bibliographical titles produced by Scarecrow, this book is far from cheap but it does do a considerable amount of groundwork for the literature searcher whose task is therefore made easier. From my own experience I know that both students and researchers do far less thorough literature searches than in the past. Indeed, the former group seem to rely exclusively on what can be gleaned from the more basic Internet sites, printed sources being too difficult to read! One wonders how long printed bibliographies such as this will be marketable. However, for any library or research establishment for which biodiversity is an important element this is well worth considering, but general libraries are likely to look for a cheaper option.
