Roots of the taxonomic impediment: Is the integrativeness a remedy?

The use of the integrative approach for classification of organisms since its formal establishment in 2005 has become a recurrent theme of zoosystematics. A bibliometric survey of the publications on integrative taxonomy of animals, which is aimed at exploring the most popular areas of research and characterizing the practical systematists' attitudes to this new approach, is presented. An analysis of 582 papers, which appeared between 2005 and 2017 in journals indexed by Scopus and the Web of Science Core Collection, has illustrated the gradual growth of the popularity of integrative taxonomy as well as some biases in the representation of higher taxa in integrated studies. It has been shown that the integrative papers have more chance of appearing in a top-ranking journal and gain relatively more citations as compared with non-integrative papers. The obtained results are discussed in the context of the taxonomic impediment problem thought to be a consequence of the institutional crisis of traditional taxonomy, which has been vividly debated over the past decades.