Scientific foundation
How this encyclopedia is built: its purpose, its method, its geographic scope, its source model, how to cite it, and where it currently stands in scientific review.
Purpose
A scientific reference for fishes — and for the shrimp published in it — documented in the territorial waters of Saudi Arabia, bringing what published sources say into one auditable registry. Every taxon carries a stable identifier that does not change when a name changes, and every fact carries the source it came from.
What the registry does not know is shown as absent. A missing value is never filled with a plausible one, and a taxon’s distribution is never inferred from its name or from its taxonomy.
What the registry holds today
Records are counted this way: species and subspecies side by side, never summed into one number called “species”. Every figure here is counted from the register on request, with what it is a share of.
- 448 published taxonomic records (447 species and 1 subspecies) in 93 families and 26 orders.
- Of these records, 439 are fishes, documented by the survey of the Marine Research Centre, Jeddah (1st ed., 2011), and 9 are shrimp, documented from the published sources cited on their own pages.
- National code: 165 records of 448 published records.
- Verified local name recorded for the Saudi Red Sea: 237 records of 448 published records — a recorded name, not documented occurrence.
- Verified local name recorded for the Saudi Arabian Gulf: 93 records of 448 published records — this does not document that the species occurs in the Gulf.
- 684 plates permitted for display of 831 registered plates.
Methodology
No fact is published in this registry unless an active provenance record ties it to a named source and to its location inside that source, with one exception, counted on request: the number of published facts that carry no citation of their own is 453 (Documentation status 439, Specimen total length 14); 14 of them state that the source records no value. The existence of that record is what “governed” means here: not a flag somebody sets, but a row that exists and can be checked.
- Scientific names are given with their author and year, and their nomenclatural status is kept as recorded.
- An approved Arabic name does not become approved by a reviewer’s approval alone: it must also carry a citation to a source that printed it.
- Two kinds of evidence are never merged: naming evidence — that a name is used in a region — and an occurrence record — that a source reports the animal there. The first is not the second.
- Local names that no reviewer has verified are shown under a heading that says so, and never in the position of an approved name.
- A fill rate measures what has been written and cited. It does not mean a scientific reviewer approved it: written content is never called “scientifically approved” by its share. Data status →
Geographic scope
The territorial waters of Saudi Arabia, in the Red Sea and the Arabian Gulf. Scope is recorded on the record itself rather than on the encyclopedia as a whole: a name recorded for the Red Sea coast stays a name of that coast, and is neither generalised to the Kingdom nor moved to the Gulf.
Source model
The registry holds 131 registered sources, and only 74 of them support the published facts — kinds: Website (39), External database or API (13), Journal article (13), Book (5), Government document (2), Report (1), Scientific paper (1); years of publication: 1948 / 1971 / 1972 / 1973 / 1974 / 1981 / 1982 / 1983 / 1989 / 1992 / 2005 / 2011 / 2017 / 2018 / 2019 / 2020 / 2021 / 2022 / 2023 / 2024 / 2025 / 2026. The rest are held with no published fact citation built on them; some support drafts, names or image rights. Each source carries its layer, and each fact carries its locator inside its source, so a reader can return to the page it came from.
Published facts with a verified citation: 1114 facts of 1567 published facts.
Here “verified” means the register checked the value against its cited source; it is not an independent scientific review. Of the 1114 facts counted, 313 were approved in the register on the founder’s own review of them, which is not an independent review, and the other 801 carry the verification they were imported with.
The source layers and what the facts rest on →
Rights in the cited works and their plates remain with their holders. Scientific source attribution is not media attribution, and media attribution is not permission to publish — which is why many species pages carry no image: none is yet cleared for display for them.
What the registry does not hold yet
- Distribution records published: 0 records of 467 held records. So no species page shows a distribution record. The distribution statements on 9 species pages are quoted from the sources cited beside them; they are not distribution records.
- Published conservation assessments: 0 assessments. Conservation assessments held: 2 assessments — only those a verified citation supports are published.
- No coordinates and no range boundaries, so no map is drawn and no point is plotted.
Citation guidance
Where the fact you are repeating carries a source — and most do — it is the source that should be cited, not the encyclopedia page. The encyclopedia is cited for the compilation and for the stable identifier, not as the authority for the fact itself.
A book is cited by its reference: “Reference N — title, edition, year”, as the sources register holds it. If you quote this release, state that it is a pre-review release whose scientific review is not complete, and give the date you consulted it together with the taxon’s stable identifier. The citation guide →
The foundation book
The foundation paper and the illustrated reference are prepared as a complete package for presentation to the issuing institution. Neither is published here yet: there is no final file to download and no open images to reuse, until the scientific review is complete and permission to publish the plates is recorded.
A download link will appear here when publication is authorised.