ProtologueCheck: Plant-Name Origin Verification at the 1753 Baseline
A lookup service for scientists to find the original 1753 description and name of any plant species.
A lookup service that takes any plant species name and returns its original 1753 treatment — first description, cited synonyms, and recorded home range — so taxonomists, journal editors, and biodiversity databases can verify that names are used and cited correctly.
Concept
Species Plantarum (1753) is the designated starting point of botanical nomenclature: for most plant groups, the binomials published there are the earliest validly published names, and every later combination or typification must cite them. The new dataset digitizes the book's treatments into structured, machine-readable form. ProtologueCheck is a single-purpose lookup API and web tool: enter a plant binomial, and it returns the matching 1753 treatment — the Latin specific diagnosis, the trivial (binomial) name, the synonyms selected from earlier authors, the recorded native locality, and a link to the digitized page — plus simple flags such as name not present in 1753, placed in a different genus in 1753, or multiple homonyms match. For authors preparing nomenclatural acts, it emits a correctly formatted protologue citation ready to paste into a manuscript. The wedge is one thing only: authoritative origin verification at the nomenclatural baseline. It is not a synonymy resolver or an identification tool — it answers what did this name originally mean, and where was it born?
Why now
The new dataset [0] shows the treatments — diagnoses, trivial names, selected synonyms, and native localities — are now digitized and structured in Plazi's treatment format, making protologue content queryable rather than locked in page scans. Today, taxonomists transcribe protologue citations by hand from scans of the 1753 edition, a known source of errors in nomenclatural publishing; with the baseline machine-readable, verification and citation generation against it becomes a tractable single-source engineering task rather than a literature hunt.
Written by GLM · 9 Oct 2026
AI assessment
A highly focused, feasible utility that solves a specific, manual pain point for botanical taxonomists by leveraging a newly structured dataset.
- Evidence strength 5/5
- The idea directly utilizes a specific, cited Zenodo dataset that has already converted the 1753 text into machine-readable Plazi format, removing the need for OCR or manual transcription.
- Market pull 3/5
- The user base is a small, niche group of academic taxonomists and publishers; while the urgency is high for those users, the total addressable market is limited.
- Novelty & moat 4/5
- Unlike the listed ideas which focus on polymer names or phylogenetic trees, this targets the specific nomenclatural baseline of 1753, filling a gap in botanical infrastructure.
- Feasibility 5/5
- Building a lookup API over an existing structured dataset is a straightforward engineering task with a very short path to MVP.
- Wedge clarity 5/5
- The wedge is exceptionally sharp: a single-purpose verification tool for the 1753 baseline, avoiding the 'platform' trap.
- Simplicity / focus 5/5
- The product is strictly limited to one function—origin verification—and explicitly rejects expanding into synonymy resolution or identification.
Scored by Gemma 4 · 9 Oct 2026. Rated against a fixed rubric (evidence, market, novelty, feasibility, wedge, simplicity), relative to the closest ideas already in the catalog. A prior estimate to compare ideas before real-world signal arrives.
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Who benefits
- Royal Botanic Gardens, Keworganization
Kew maintains Plants of the World Online and co-runs IPNI; machine-readable 1753 protologues would directly enrich its name records with the original diagnoses, synonyms, and localities behind every basionym.
IAPT publishes Taxon, where new combinations and typifications require accurate protologue citations; an automated check against the 1753 baseline reduces editorial workload and nomenclatural errors.
- Magnolia Press (Phytotaxa)company
Phytotaxa publishes large volumes of new plant taxa and combinations, and every such paper must cite protologues correctly, making compliance checking a daily editorial need.
- Pensoft Publisherscompany
Pensoft's biodiversity journals already integrate Plazi's TreatmentBank into authoring and review workflows, so a protologue-verification step is a natural add-on for its nomenclature-heavy submissions.
- Biodiversity Heritage Libraryorganization
The dataset links to BHL's digitized copy of the 1753 work; name-level links from treatments back to BHL pages would drive usage of its historic literature and demonstrate its value.