Scholarly publishing by the Torrey Botanical Society

We review the history of scholarly publishing by the Torrey Botanical Society from the organization’s inception to the present day. There are two current publications: Journal of the Torrey Botanical Society and Memoirs of the Torrey Botanical Society. For these two titles, and their precursors, we list the 25 individuals who have served as head editors. In total, there were 160 individuals who have served in some editorial capacity for a Torrey Botanical Society publication. We review the editorial service of a selection of 18 of these editors whom we regarded as especially prominent, and we provide photographs of three of them: William Henry Leggett, John Hendley Barnhart, and Murray Fife Buell. To assess the impact of publication of the Society, we exported from the Index to American Botanical Literature all citations associated with all of the journals and other publications associated with the Society. In total, 6,635 article titles were searched in Google Scholar to determine the number of times each had been cited; Google Scholar was selected because of its coverage of older literature. In total, 88,226 citations were recorded for the 6,122 articles found in Google Scholar. We list the 10 most cited articles from the Society’s publications. On the basis of data from the International Plant Names Index, we estimated that a total of 18,240 nomenclatural novelties of seed plants, ferns, and lycophytes have been published by the Society.