Dataset of Burkhardt 2022 Encyclopaedia of Eponymic Plant Names

Author Lotte Burkhardt published in 2022 a free PDF entitled Encyclopedia of Eponymic Plant names. It consisted of two volumes, one listing all plant, algae, lichen, fossil plant, and fungal genera from A-Z and indicating the person they were named after. The other volume takes the list of people honored A-Z and lists the genera named after them. Both volumes can be found online here. This dataset was initially created by Carmen Ulloa Ulloa by scraping the PDF of the A-Z names of people honored and converting it into a Google Sheet. The data were normalized with each row representing a person and the first names, eponymic genera and the associated families split into multiple columns to make analysis easier. The dataset was further cleaned up as the conversion from PDF was not 100% accurate with some names being split onto multiple lines, characters misread etc. People honored that were identified as women were marked as such in the gender column based on the follow up work to a prevous paper by the Women Plant Genera working group. We have split the resulting table into three files. The first one contains the entire list of people honoured and the all genera named for them. The other two are the first table split into just the people who have flowering plant genera named after them, along with the genera. The last one is a list of all the people who have non-plant genera named for them. Most of the women in the plants-only tab have been marked up from the Women Plant Genera working group project. More information could be added to the women for whom non-plant genera were named. We highly encourage anyone who is interested in an analysis of their own based on this data to do so, and get in touch with us with any questions. We anticipate that work on additional groups will deepen our understanding of the impact of the contributions women have made to botany. Our hope is that by making this dataset publically available others will explore the world of genera and eponomy, looking at interesting stories of people for whom genera were named. The team would be greatful for any updates or corrections to this data, and we plan to publish updated versions of this dataset accordingly. Version 1.1 contains corrections for Joseph Henderson, as well as corrections to some of the formulas calculating the number of names for each person.