LEVITON & ANDERSON: HERPETOLOGICAL LITERATURE FOR SOUTHWESTERN ASIA 
IX 
ing up with the popular literature on herpetoculture, although we have included those that, serendipitously, came 
to our attention. In some cases, we have only the title, or the reference is in other ways incomplete. We have in¬ 
cluded such publications to call attention to them with the expectation that we, or others, will eventually com¬ 
plete the citation. A few websites are included, for the most part those maintained by academic institutions and 
museums. We have made no attempt to be comprehensive with regard to websites owing to impermanence. 
We have made every effort to be consistent in our use of diacritical marks, but we know there are gaps. This 
is particularly true for the many references in Turkish and to some extent Eastern European languanges such as 
Hungarian, Czech and Slovak. The bibliography was prepared using Papyrus©, which includes nearly all of the 
Western European glyphs, e.g., aageenoii, but assuredly not diacritical marks for all languages. To the ex¬ 
tent possible, we have gone back and entered such elements as e G g I n r S § § and others, but time constraints 
have made it impossible to recheck all foreign references when editing the final manuscript. We trust that our 
colleagues will forgive our shortcomings in this regard. 
Keywords have been a particular concern. Without them, a bibliography of this size is of limited utility. First 
and foremost, we have tried to include keywords that indicate the countries and important geographic areas cov¬ 
ered in each publication, and we have listed as keywords the taxa included in the work that occur in our area. In 
large, comprehensive works, e.g., Boulenger’s catalogues, we have not recorded species that do not occur in 
Southwest Asia. We have tried to include keywords that describe the general subject matters of the reference. 
Obviously, we could only be inclusive for those works actually before us. Otherwise, we have had to list key¬ 
words based solely on the titles. The reader can look up keywords in the keyword index (pp. 429ff) and find the 
titles, listed by number, which include that keyword. Alternatively, users of the PDF version can utilize the 
search features of Adobe Acrobat© to search for works containing the keyword. 
A cautionary note: Synonymies cannot be constructed through use of the keyword index and bibliography 
alone. We have not been able to include all of the permutations of Latin names used in the citations. The bibli¬ 
ography will lead the user to the necessary titles, but the references themselves must be checked for accurate or¬ 
thography of the taxonomic names. For many taxa, we have included the current names in brackets [ ] in the key¬ 
word index in those instances where the keyword taxon name is no longer current. We realize that in many in¬ 
stances the taxonomy is unsettled, and it should not come as a surprise that some users will not agree with our 
judgments. We can only take refuge in noting that we have tried to use the most recent interpretations found in 
the literature, certainly for groups where we lack the most up-to-date expertise ourselves. Taxonomy is a “mov¬ 
ing target!” and phylogenetic reshuffling and the reorganization of species groups and clades at all levels are tak¬ 
ing place more rapidly than ever before. Most notable are the reorganization of groups such as the ranid frogs, 
some of which are now referred to other family groups, the colubrid snakes, especially the former nearly ubiq¬ 
uitous genera Elaphe and Coluber, and so forth. 
We continue both to edit existing references and to add new ones to this bibliography. In the forthcoming 
updates, we plan to publish these additions and corrections as addenda to the existing list. Although we tried to 
be inclusive through the year 2000, we have added many titles through 2009. However, we still have many un¬ 
incorporated articles sitting on our desks, and we realize that this will always be so. On the other hand, and in 
response to inquiries by our colleagues, we wish to make our efforts available without further delay. We would 
be most grateful to receive correspondence correcting our mistakes and omissions. Particularly helpful are actu¬ 
al copies of papers so that we can personally verify citations and list keywords. 
We thank the many people who have sent us reprints and references over the past decades. We could not 
have assembled this bibliography without the help of librarians at our respective institutions. They have searched 
out many obscure and ancient publications in many languages and made them available to us. We are, further¬ 
more, especially grateful to Dr. Kraig Adler, Cornell University, for his hospitality to Alan Leviton and for open¬ 
ing his large and important personal library for checking references. Leviton also made extensive use of the li¬ 
brary of the Smithsonian Institution, and we thank Dr. George Zug, Division of Amphibians and Reptiles, Smith¬ 
sonian Institution, for his facilitation, friendship, and encouragement. We also want to express our appreciation 
of the work done by Dr. Michele L. Aldrich, the most extraordinary proofreader we have ever known, who went 
far beyond the call to duty; she scanned the whole work and pointed out numerous inconsistencies, which we 
have tried to correct before going to press. And last, but not least, both Dr. Aaron Bauer, Villanova University, 
and Ms. Hallie Brignall, the latter the Academy’s managing editor of Scientific Publications, perused segments 
of the work, the former providing missing data, the latter searching for errors and more inconsistencies. We are 
