purple_dye wrote:In this post I'm going to try to gather some standard information that should be researched for each plant...
I think it's great to outline a sort of standard organization scheme, but in a lot of ways it's putting the cart before the horse. I wouldn't worry too much about organizing the information until there is information to organize. As I've researched plants, I've found that a lot of information doesn't necessarily fit neatly into one category. I'll often include the same factoid from the same source in multiple sections or contexts. Or sometimes I'll tag a piece of information for one section, but I end up using it in a completely different section once I start writing.
To me, the real value of this collaborative research is in crowdsourcing the collection of information. Once that is done, someone who is interested in the particular topic can go through and organize the information into a neat summary.
For some of the categories you listed, it's convenient to target your research (for example, to find nomenclature and descriptions, you could use a botany database like tropicos.org). But when you're using Google Scholar or following up citations from references like
Pharmacotheon, you're apt to encounter information from several categories. And if you find all of that information jumbled together, I say collect it all and sort it out later (maybe follow each quotation with a list of categories it might apply to, so it will be easier to sort out).
A few comments on the listed categories:
Quote:8. Literature citations
I feel strongly that this should not be its own separate category. Sure, if you organize all the information that you've found into a summary article, you'll want to include a bibliography section.
But when you're researching, you don't just want to collect a list of sources that talk about the plant in question; you want to collect the information from those sources (and keep track of which information came from which source, so others can use your summary as a guide to the literature).
Quote:9. Nomenclature
1. Description
5. Identification
7. Geographical records
I would group all of these categories into a single category: Botany. Each of the listed categories could be retained as separate sub-categories. Identification is sort of a redundant topic for most of the plants listed above, as the critical information for identifying them is contained in the botanical descriptions. I suppose you could include a dichotomous key for the genus, but it would take an awful lot of space to include this information in the summary for every species.
Since a lot of plant nomenclature is being reorganized as phylogenetic analysis tells us more about which species are related to each other, it would be nice to include a section discussing any relevant phylogenetic analysis that has been performed.
Information on this can be quite sparse for poorly-studied jungle plants. If you can find it, definitely include it. I think this is a section where it is appropriate to cite forum posts (from the Nexus and/or other forums) by people who grow the plant. Often that's the only place to find information on growing some of the more obscure plants.
Quote:2. Medicinal uses
12. Culture
I would combine these two into a single Tradition Use or Anthropology/Ethnobotany section. Often the medicinal uses are intimately tied with the cultural contexts in which they are employed. With visionary plants, the cures are often accomplished by using the plant to divine a non-material cause of the disease (predicated on belief in a particular type of non-material realm) or by using the plant as a means to ask spirits to intercede on behalf of the patient (predicated on a culturally-specific spiritual cosmology).
Quote:4. Alkaloid content
Just something to think about: How much information should be included when discussing the chemistry of a plant? For common chemicals (DMT, harmine, etc.), it's tempting to simply say that (for a completely arbitrary example) the leaves contained 0.1% and the stems contained 0.04%, and maybe include a reference to TiHKAL or Trout's Notes. But for less common ones (some of the substituted β-carbolines like 6-MeO-2-Me-THβC) or ones unique to the plant (like the salvinorins, salvidivins, salvinicins, and divinatorins from
S. divinorum) it clearly seems better to include a full set of data. Even for the more common chemicals like harmine, there aren't really any good resources on the internet that collect all that data into one place, so really it's a good idea to consider including a full entry for all important chemicals reported from the plant.
Then again, a full set of data would include: common name, IUPAC name, molecular formula, molar mass, exact molar mass, appearance, melting point, boiling point, pKa(s), XlogP, IR spectral data, UV spectral data, specific rotation, Rf (retention factor) values, mass spec data, 1H NMR, 13C NMR, references to crystallography, isolation procedures, synthesis procedures, receptor affinity/EC50/Emax data, and cliffnotes on the pharmacology.
That's a whole lot of stuff to track down, and that much information devoted to the chemistry could bog down an entry whose primary goal is to collect information on the plant. So maybe it would be better to just include data on what chemicals were reported at what concentrations from which portions of the plant, and link to a separate entry for the chemical data (which could easily be housed in the Nexus wiki, for example). I imagine that in a few years time, the Nexus could have its own Chemical Index database that surpasses Trout's Notes or the Shulgin Index.
Definitely good to collect these into their own section. Just be sure to include citations for every name. Just look at Rätsch's
Encyclopedia of Psychoactive Plants: his lists of common names are completely worthless; many of them are clearly from hearsay or are recent "slang" terms, and even with the traditional names you can't follow them back to the source and see what context they were reported in.
This is another topic that requires a lot of careful consideration. It sounds simple enough to say "cover the history of the plant." But then you have to ask yourself: Which history? There are a lot of different ways to consider history. For example:
The history from the perspective of the indigenous people who use the plant: This is composed partly of creation myths, and partly of vague and contradictory tidbits of oral history. If multiple cultures used the plant, they will often have different sets of traditional "history" associated with it.
Archaeological history: Depending on the climate, there may be ancient samples of the plant that can be dated to give clues about its ancient history. Or if no samples of the plant have survived, there may still be paraphernalia associated with the plant that provide grounds to speculate on the history.
Botanical history: Phylogenetic analysis can provide information about the very ancient history of the plant (migration events, relation to other plants, etc.). Sometimes certain reproductive features can suggest information about the plant's history of being cultivated by humans.
Speculative history: The best example of this is the ancient
soma complex. In discussing the fly agaric mushroom (or syrian rue, ephedra, various lotuses, cannabis, etc.), should you discuss the evidence that has been cited in favor of it being identified as
soma? Should the history of ergot include a discussion of the
Kykeon potion? Should a history of
Salvia divinorum include a discussion of the Nahuatl plant
pipiltzintzintli?
Western recorded history: Travelogues of early explorers or ethnobotanists give us yet another angle (i.e. the history of the plant's introduction to Western awareness). Often these are tied with the identification of the plant, but sometimes the accounts predate botanical identification, so some degree of speculation is involved. And what is the cutoff date for this Western-centric history? Should it include a history of the plant's rising reputation in the Western entheogenic subculture from the early psychedelic era of the 1960s (or earlier) through the modern age of the internet? Should it include a timeline of the published ethnobotanical literature that introduced the plant to Western audiences, or should that information stay in the Anthropology/Ethnobotany section? Should it chronologically include chemical investigations that clarified the nature of the drug to Western audiences, or should that be incorporated into the Chemistry section?
This is all just food for thought. At this stage, I think simply collecting the information is more important than figuring out how to organize it. I know from experience all of the considerations that go into organizing information from the literature into a clear summary. A lot of these things are stylistic choices that might be better left in the hands of the authors who wish to write the summaries. Then again, if we get organized and compile all of these entries into a DMT-Nexus Plant Index, it would be nice to have all entries organized into a standardized form.
But like I said at the beginning, this seems to be putting the cart before the horse. Let's first wait and see how successful we are in getting collaborative efforts going to collect the information.