Working Bibliography of Cuckoos and Turacos of the World.—Johannes Erritzoe, with contributions by Oscar van Rootselaar. 2000. Johannes Erritzoe, Christiansfeldt, Denmark. 401 pp., 1 CD-ROM. ISBN 87-987835-0-5. $65.00 (cloth).
This book provides a list of references on cuckoos and turacos numbered and ordered by author's name and year of publication. The list is also provided on a CD-ROM to facilitate searches. The electronic reference list is accessed through Adobe Acrobat, which is available free on the Internet. Some references, primarily those for which the title is not sufficiently informative as to subject matter, are accompanied by comments, such as the name of the studied species, geographical region concerned, and key words. This information is very useful for defining the scope of searches using the CD-ROM. A list of English common names and scientific names of cuckoos and turacos is presented, including the number(s) of pertinent references. Another section of the book organizes references by the country or geographical location where the study took place. Searches by geographical location can be done directly with the CD-ROM.
Although it is possible to perform searches using the CD-ROM, because the file is in .pdf format it is not possible to save the results. Instead, the user is limited to viewing the search results page-by-page, onscreen.
To evaluate how complete Erritzoe's reference list is, we compared his list to the cuckoo and turaco references through 1999 included in three publications on cuckoos (Aragon et al. 1999, J. Evol. Biol. 12:495–506; Hughes 1996, Auk 113:10–22; M. Robert 2000, Le parasitism de ponte chez les oiseaux: orige et evolution hôtes-parasites, Ph.D. dissertation, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris), as well as some randomly chosen references from our own database on cuckoos. Of 304 references checked, 85.2% were in Erritzoe's book. Most of the missing references were from 1999 and 1998. When references from 1999 were removed from the comparisons, the percentage reached 90.9% (n = 276), and when 1998 was also excluded, the inclusion rate was 97.6% (n = 245). Finally, when only references published before 1996 were included in the comparison, only one reference was not found in the book (99.6%, n = 225). Therefore, although the book was published in 2000, it is obvious that many references from 1999, but also some from 1998, are missing. However, it can also be said that based on the comparisons presented here, most of the references on cuckoos and turacos are included in this book. Although some references, largely those from the most recent years, could not be included, this book is potentially a good tool for students and researchers looking for literature on these families, especially for finding references published in journals not included in general reference databases such as Current Contents, Biopsis, and ISI.
