Does 'Research Grade' actually mean anything?

On the one hand, many dedicated and knowledgeable people work on iNaturalist. Museum collections with graduate students may actually have less accountability when mistakes exist.

On the other hand, one click on the CV suggestion and one followup agreement is a fairly low standard for inclusion in GBIF.

Also, let’s remember that we’re all here to make this site as successful as possible. Arguing about these topics may lead to actionable changes the staff can implement to improve the legitimacy of the ‘Research Grade’ label, or not and we had fun anyways.

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‘Research Grade’ is a highfalutin phrase for sure, but good enough for its purpose here. We could call it George and it would still mean the same thing.

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The few times I interacted with non-inaturalist plant observations on GBIF - I always found some completely misidentified herbarium specimens. I actually tried to contact one of the herbariums and tell them they uploaded a misidentified specimen to GBIF, but they never replied nor fixed it. So as far as I can tell inaturalist’s “research grade” observations may actually be the most accurate dataset there is - and if someone ever finds a mistake very easy and immediate to fix. Not saying that we shouldn’t try and improve it further, but there’s just some inherent limitations to what can be done.

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In theory sure, but in practice according to an iNat blog post back in 2020 showed that the top 2000 identifiers placed 87% of the ID’s (don’t know what it is now), so there’s not as many identifiers as you might think. And most of us have people that we reach out to for help with ID’s. Personally, I can think of quite a few where 4 or 5 people agreed on the wrong ID and went inactive. So I tagged 8-10 people to help flip it. If you went through placing bad ID’s willy-nilly, that would be annoying, but it would get fixed. Also considering that if you go look at who the top identifiers in many taxons are, you’ll see a lot of real experts in what they’re identifying.

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I agree that the phrasing is flawed, but I agree with those saying changing it would be harmful and/or fruitless even more. It’s not a perfect narrative but it’s sufficient and changing it would lead to a lot more confusion than what already exists.

Once you learn what it really means, it does make sense. It doesn’t necessarily mean “this is 100% accurate” but it’s “good enough”, and that’s how they’re treated once they reach RG. So, based on that, while imperfect, the wording is good enough for me and I’d hate to see it changed this late in the game.

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Can this subject be merged with this one: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/rename-research-grade-discussion-and-polls/590 (the link that OP already referenced)?

It’s essentially a rehashing of the same thing, and a repeat of the same topic and ‘question’ that’s been raised, discussed, and settled many times in the past.

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You could. Begin to. But when iNatters recognise your name for the wrong reason … we fight back with available tools.

I would like the 2 who agree to exclude the observer, making it more objective. But that falls at the first hurdle - for many swathes of biodiversity it is hard to find a second, let alone a third! We each evaluate where the next ‘Research Grade’ falls on our own scale.

PS when I have helpfully IDed with the Placeholder, I withdraw when Research Grade is placeholder and observer. Count me out! We need an impartial second here.

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Oh my goodness, yes. I have spent HOURS trying to contact people to fix errors in some of the “expert” databases. Most of the time I’m never able to even get a response.

There’s several dozen plant species that appear on all the botanical checklists for my county because they’re in a certain database and have the incorrect GPS coordinates inputted, or because some expert misidentified something.

The iNat species list is actually much more accurate for my area - there’s always a few random misidentifications in there but they never stay for long.

I think large numbers of non-professionals reviewing things constantly is much more likely to provide accurate results in the end than a small number of professionals whose work never gets checked, and who often have exaggerated ideas about their skill levels.

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I’m almost willing to do this, but not quite, since the OP here is questioning the meaning/value of the designation overall, and not merely changing its name.

But that said, I do encourage those who specifically want to support or oppose a name-change to post those thoughts in the other topic, which I re-opened for the purpose. If the naming discussion continues here, we’ll probably end up closing this topic and re-directing to the other one.

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Of course it means something, but the name of RG doesn’t matter, it can be called a purple fungus, if you and I know what it means, it’s all that’s needed. RG moves observation from one state to another, changing its place in the system. RG is not poor, there’re mistakes, as well as mistakes in “pro” collections, and those mistakes are easier to change, but majority of RG are correct, it’s easy to miss that if you’re looking only at specific taxa that can get challenging.

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I wonder if the some of these concerns reflect an inflated impression of the ‘cleanness’ of academic research. Researchers operate in a hermetic bubble that only excellent data can enter because it’s all passed through peer review and other quality checks, bad data entering damages the research and misleads or inconveniences researchers. Actually research is messy; you’re always dealing with assessments of the quality of the data you’re using and the papers you’re citing. Writings on various taxa often begin with ‘we examined specimens in such and such a museum and found this many misidentified…’ ‘RG’ just means this has reached a point where it is worth offering to researchers. Any researcher using the dataset without personally assessing its accuracy for the particular taxon is simply not doing their everyday job. Then again, as mentioned above, there are plenty of reasons to think the accuracy is pretty good for a great many taxa.

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What is The Matrix?

Of course the name means something, and I think the fact that people are dismissing such confirms the problem I’m pointing out.

If the name could be anything, then it is functionally useless, hence a confidence meter or colour tabs or similar would at least clearly indicate the meaning and use of ID totals.

All the other things people are talking of here in terms of users reviewing and updating and debating ID’s can happen without (and in spite of) the Research Grade label.

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I would only like to point out that the idea of the taxon and its identification as something objective and unambiguous (which I sometimes encounter among not only amateur naturalists, but also experts) is partly false. Certainly, scientific taxonomy is always based on objective facts (otherwise it would not be scientific). But the set of facts available to us is always limited, and their interpretation may be different. Therefore, the scientific concept of a taxon itself can be a matter of consensus in the scientific community.

For example, the taxon Megacopta punctatissima has 130 RG observations. But the authors of the Catalogue of Palaearctic Heteroptera are of the opinion that it is only a junior synonym of M. cribraria. Is M. punctatissima an “RG taxon”?

In fact, any identification (regardless of the number of confirmations, including by experts) may be false. Scientific taxonomy is created, in essence, by the same people, and errare humanum est (perseverare diabolicum :wink:).

Therefore, making any precise gradation of the “quality” of identification seems to me an unlikely task. Regardless of whether there are 2, 3, or, for example, 10 categories. There will always be uncertain “gray areas” and variability within the categories.

The existing category “Research Grade” is a rather clearly defined entity, a well-known and widely used term. Even if its name does not quite capture its essence and may be misleading, I would be extremely cautious about changing it. Any change of such a term (used by millions of people) can have serious and not always predictable effects.

As for increasing the number of identifications needed to achieve RG, I will only repeat myself and agree with my colleagues’ opinion - “we don’t have so many experts”. That is, this would automatically take numerous quite reliably identified observations out of this category. And it may reduce the motivation of identifiers because qualitative improvement of the data (their transition to a “higher” category) in many groups of organisms will become unattainable.

In addition, I think it is important not to forget that any change in the RG category will affect the iNaturalist Research-grade Observations dataset in GBIF. Many of the data in this dataset are already in use by researchers. Consequently, such changes would also affect their work and its results. It seems to me that really serious reasons are needed to consider this an acceptable risk.

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I’d suggest that that is the popular interpretation of research, whereas those of us involved in it are extremely aware of just how messy it is, and (in the sciences dealing with species nomenclature) how often scientific species names change. This is a subject that @charlie has commented on often, pointing out that often the frequently maligned common names are more stable and long-lasting than the academically assigned binomials.

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No, it can’t, you need to know when your observations are going to GBIF, you need to easily filter what you want to id or see. So no, name is just put there to be there, because everything should have a name, if there were no RG written we would make our own names, because that’s how human brain is working.

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:joy: Agreed ~ but I’d probably be less likely to volunteer my time as an IDer if it led to more “George observations”. Contributing to make something “Research Grade” just sounds more worthwhile.

~ no offense to the Georges out there:)

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Assuming all the basic criteria for a verifiable observation are fulfilled, it just means that more than one person gave the same ID which happens to be the majority. How they each arrived at that ID and their reasoning is more important, because it makes the difference between agreeing and independently arriving at the same conclusion

Well, that’s what it says on the tin. :-)

As a researcher, I do not consider the “research grade” marker to be useful in identifying the observations that will be informative to me. Other researchers will have the opposite opinion. There’s a lot of other context involved.

“Research grade” certainly does mean something—but it tends not to mean what people think it means.

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Yup. Viewed in this light, we can think of “research grade” as meaning: If you’re OK with messy data and working on a problem where the volume of data is going to make the analysis pretty resilient to errors in individual observations, you can probably relax your data QA / QC somewhat.

It doesn’t mean “just trust the data and don’t do any QA / QC”, and conversely lacking the “research grade” marker doesn’t mean an observation isn’t useful for research. “Research grade” just means there’s been a little more QA / QC on the iNaturalist side, and for some research that’ll make your life easier.

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