The DOI matches its Crossref record.
How Many Species Inhabit the Earth?
Overview
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Claims the paper makes
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Citations
Cited by
How Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean?
Mora, C., Tittensor, D. P., Adl, S., Simpson, A. G. B., & Worm, B. (2011) · PLoS Biology · doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001127 · Cited by 3,045
“May [2] questioned the assumption that temperate regions were better sampled than tropical ones; the approach also assumed consistent diversity gradients across taxa which is not factual [4].”
BackgroundHomage to Linnaeus: How many parasites? How many hosts?
Dobson, A., Lafferty, K. D., Kuris, A. M., Hechinger, R. F., & Jetz, W. (2008) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.0803232105 · Cited by 760
How many species of arthropods? Erwin's estimate revised
ØDEGAARD, F. (2000) · Biological Journal of the Linnean Society · doi:10.1006/bijl.2000.0468 · Cited by 409
Controversies in parasitology, Most of the species on Earth are parasites
Windsor, D. A. (1998) · International Journal for Parasitology · doi:10.1016/s0020-7519(98)00153-2 · Cited by 290
What it Takes to Fly: The Structural and Functional Respiratory Refinements in Birds and Bats
Maina, J. N. (2000) · Journal of Experimental Biology · doi:10.1242/jeb.203.20.3045 · Cited by 189
Metadata
- Authors
- May, R. M.
- Venue
- Scientific American
- Published
- 1992-10
- Volume
- 267
- Issue
- 4
- Pages
- 42-48
- ISSN
- 0036-8733 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W1981572758
- Cited by
- 205
- References
- 0
- FWCI
- 11.15
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
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How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: How Many Species Inhabit the Earth? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1038/scientificamerican1092-42
- The paper
- May, R. M. (1992). How Many Species Inhabit the Earth? Scientific American. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1092-42
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
