The New Guinea species Polyscias macranthum can occasionally become quite large and is locally used for lumber.
It was later determined that this character does not clearly distinguish the two genera, and they were united under Arthrophyllum by William Raymond Philipson in 1978, bringing the total number of species up to about 30.
[5] For Arthrophyllum in New Caledonia, the taxonomic history is complex, because the species are not clearly distinct, and their circumscription has varied greatly from one author to another.
The genus Arthrophyllum was named by Carl Ludwig von Blume in 1826[7] in his classic es:Bijdragen tot de flora van Nederlandsch Indië.
[12] His treatment of Arthrophyllum was largely followed in a checklist and nomenclator for Araliaceae that was compiled by Frodin and Govaerts in 2003.
They were not able to determine what Philipson had intended by the name Arthrophyllum maingayi, one of the 17 species that he described for Flora Malesiana.
In 2010, a molecular phylogenetic study of the pinnate Araliaceae showed that they could not be divided into genera that could easily be distinguished morphologically.
Philipson (1979) had included P. royenii, P. schultzei and P. zippeliana in his Polyscias section Kissodendron, but covered only the Malesian species.
The taxonomic history of the New Caledonian members of Polyscias subgenus Arthrophyllum is complex.
Ten valid species names and a nomen nudum have been published in Arthrophyllum for this group.
Frodin and Govaerts treated five of these eight names as a fourth species, Arthrophyllum balansae.
Gregory M. Plunkett, Jun Wen, Porter P. Lowry II, Murray J. Henwood, Pedro Fiaschi, and Anthony D. Mitchell.