1.8. Improvements to citation and visibility for collections (USE)

I think this is a very worthy goal although one that may not be as attainable as one might think.

In the herbarium community, citation of specimens is commonplace and, unless I am mistaken, one of the reasons that Index Herbariorum came into existence was so that authors would have a shorthand representation to use when citing particular collections. While it is very widely used, I believe that some journals neither require authors to acknowledge the source of such abbreviations or to even consistently use them. It’s now even a bit more important with the advent of online supplementary material that, by the admission of at least two journal policies that I have seen, such appendices are not carefully checked during the editorial process. I would hope in this age of wanting to more clearly being able to derive collection usage statistics that the attitude towards such citations would change.