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Last updated: lørdag 20. april 2024

An Online Bibliography of the Chironomidae

Kaare Aagaard1, Odwin Hoffrichter2, Martin Spies3, Marc Daverdin1 & Torbjørn Ekrem1

1 Museum of Natural History and Archaeology, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway
2 Institut für Biologie I, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Hauptstraße 1, 79104 Freiburg, Germany
3 Zoologische Staatssammlung München, Münchhausenstr. 21, 81247 München, Germany

The bibliography of Chironomidae literature was initiated by Ernst J. Fittkau, Friedrich Reiss and Odwin Hoffrichter almost forty years ago. Multiple additions and corrections have been published over the years, most significantly in the many annual contributions by Odwin Hoffrichter in the Chironomus Newsletter on Chironomidae Research. The current bibliography contains 32573 entries and is presented here as a database that can be searched, and supplemented with additional data, by anyone with an internet connection.

What does the Bibliography of the Chironomidae include?
The bibliography includes works with content found or (in exceptional cases) assumed to pertain significantly to the fly family Chironomidae. Academic theses, project reports and other items of 'grey' literature are included, even if they are not considered as publications in the strict sense. Press articles, zoological and entomological textbooks and identification keys in which chironomids are only very briefly mentioned are not considered. However, a few older popular publications considering aquatic culture (or similar topics) and early natural history publications (e.g. by Aristotle) are included.

How to use the Bibliography of the Chironomidae?
The database can be searched by entering complete or partial, single or multiple search words or terms in one or more of the “Author”, “Year”, “Title” or “Journal/Book/Publisher” fields. Using more than one search term in a single field will only retrieve entries that contain all entered terms. (Please note that the database uses the Norwegian alphabetizing: the letters Æ, Ø and Å follow after Z and AA is read as Å).

Please cite this database as:
Aagaard, K., Hoffrichter, O., Spies, M., Daverdin, M. & Ekrem, T. An Online Bibliography of the Chironomidae. NTNU Museum of Natural History and Archaeology, Trondheim, Norway: http://literature.vm.ntnu.no/Chironomidae/.

How will the bibliography be updated?
You are invited to help update and improve the Online Bibliography of the Chironomidae on your own initiative. Please click here for more information on how to register and contribute. The editors are aiming to incorporate datasets of new titles from public databases at appropriate intervals, but such activities will be subject to limited spare time and resources. For corrections of existing entries in the bibliography, users are kindly requested to write to bibliography.chironomidae@vm.ntnu.no.

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History of the Bibliography of the Chironomidae
The first general bibliography of the Chironomidae was published in 1976. It was assembled by Ernst Josef Fittkau, Friedrich Reiss and Odwin Hoffrichter and published by the Royal Norwegian Society of Science and Letters, The Museum in a technical report series named Gunneria (no: 26).

That bibliography was based on the extensive collections of relevant works assembled at the Max-Planck-Institut für Limnologie in Plön, later moved to the Zoologische Staatssammlung München (Zoological Collections of the State of Bavaria in Munich). The first edition contained 6400 papers published up to 1974. The bibliography used original titles of all publications if they were in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese or Latin. Titles in other languages were transliterated and/or translated into English, German or French, where applicable. Each reference was classified as containing data in the research fields of cytology, ecology, general, history, morphology, parasitology, physiology or systematics.

A supplement with 1700 titles was published by Odwin Hoffrichter and Friedrich Reiss in Gunneria (no: 37) in 1981. Besides presenting an update with works published after 1974, this also corrected or added a large number of titles published earlier.

During the end of the 1980s and up to 1995, new titles were included based on drafts made by Odwin Hoffrichter. The retyping of all approximately 17,000 entries into an electronic format was performed by technical staff at the Norwegian Institute of Nature research (NINA) in Trondheim.

A discussion on how to transform the bibliography into a database started at the International Chironomidae Symposium in Amsterdam in 1991. However, the project turned out to be unrealistic at the time, as it still involved the assignment of research field keywords to all the entries.

In 1995, Hoffrichter started to publish annual bibliographies as comprehensive as feasible in the Chironomus Newsletter on Chironomidae Research, and continued to do so until November 2010. At the 2006 Chironomidae Symposium in Funchal, he distributed copies of an electronic file with titles through 2004 which has since been emended, where necessary, by Martin Spies.

Beginning in autumn 2011, all those previously registered data were transformed into a database for easy online access by workers at the Museum of Natural History and Archaeology at The Norwegian University of Sciences and Technology. Now, this institution and the authors are proud to present this highly useful resource of references to the chironomid literature.