Student or educator? Sign up with your school email and get 6 months of Pro free.
Cited by 899

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 2 of the 2 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Geographic gradients in body size: a clarification of Bergmann's rule

Open access
Blackburn, Tim M., Gaston, Kevin J., Loder, Natasha·1999·Diversity and Distributions

Abstract

Summary: 1997 marked the sesquicentenary of the publication by Carl Bergmann of the observation that, in general, large‐bodied animal species tend to live further north than their small‐bodied relatives. This has been dubbed Bergmann's rule in his honour. However, more than 150 years on, we appear to be little closer to a general understanding of the rule, or even to any consensus as to whether it exists. This is due in large part to confusion about the taxonomic level at which the rule is considered to operate, and to the conflation of pattern and mechanism. In this paper, we attempt to resolve this confusion by highlighting its sources, and by providing a definition of Bergmann's rule that is practical and useful, yet that retains the essential features of its original formulation. We conclude by briefly reviewing the mechanisms proposed to explain Bergmann's rule as we define it.

Overview

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1046/j.1472-4642.1999.00046.x

Cites

2 of 2 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Verification

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Citations

Cites

Show all 2 references

Cited by

See all 899

Metadata

Authors
Blackburn, T. M., Gaston, K. J., & Loder, N.
Venue
Diversity and Distributions
Publisher
Wiley
Published
1999-07
Volume
5
Issue
4
Pages
165-174
ISSN
  • 0967-9952 (ISSN-L)
  • 1366-9516
  • 1472-4642
OpenAlex
W1507204616
Cited by
899
References
2
FWCI
7.04
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
bronze

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.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review

How to cite

Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.

This page
CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Geographic gradients in body size: a clarification of Bergmann's rule. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1046/j.1472-4642.1999.00046.x
The paper
Blackburn, T. M., Gaston, K. J., & Loder, N. (1999). Geographic gradients in body size: a clarification of Bergmann's rule. Diversity and Distributions. https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1472-4642.1999.00046.x

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.