What You’re Doing Is Rather Desperate

Bar-tailed godwit

Update: the “missing article” surfaced in my RSS reader on Nov 1; here’s the link

You may recall a recent story that appeared at most media outlets concerning “E7″, a bar-tailed godwit (Limosa lapponica) that flew 11 680 km non-stop, Alaska to New Zealand. Here are some of the reports:

• Bird, Uninterrupted
• Bar-tailed Godwit Becomes a New Bird Record-Holder: “According to Proceedings of the Royal Society B…”
• Bird flaps wings for 9 days non-stop: “The study, reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B…”
• Extreme Endurance Flights By Landbirds Crossing The Pacific Ocean: “Proceedings B is the Royal Society’s flagship biological research journal…”
• Amazing Marathon Bird: “According to the U.S. Geological Survey and a study published in an English journal…”
• Meet the birds that cross the Pacific in 9 days without stopping flapping wings: “The study was published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B”
• Wading bird travels 7,000 miles nonstop to break flying record: “…and have reported their findings in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B”
• Avian airlines: Alaska to New Zealand nonstop: “…researchers report online October 21 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B”
• Small bird leaves scientists gobsmacked: “…has been published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B”; “The Washington Post quoted Robert F Gill”

If you want to know even more, there’s a NPR podcast interview with Robert (E, not F) Gill, an official USGS press release and a website for Shorebird Research at the Alaska Science Center.

Note that many of the stories mention an associated publication, in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. One source states explicitly that the work is online, from October 21 2008. Yet when I go to the journal website, I can find no trace of any such article – and they have in-advance content, running through to December. Nor does searching the site for “godwit” or author names lead to a publication. Nothing can be found in PubMed, Google Scholar, CiteULike or any other web source.

So what’s going on? Possibilities include:

• The article does exist and I’m just really stupid
• There’s another arm of Proc. Royal Soc. B. online that I haven’t discovered
• The article is not in Proc. Royal Soc. B., but some other journal
• The authors are hoping to submit to Proc. Royal Soc. B., or the article is under review, or in press, or was submitted but rejected
• Some confusion has arisen with an earlier article from 2005 in the journal Condor
• Many media sources are lazy, do not check their facts and all rely on one or two organisations to gather information which they then copy, propagating errors to almost every news outlet on the web

This breakdown in my normally-efficient information gathering process has left me quite perplexed. If you have any insights, please share!