In zoological nomenclature, author citation is the process in which a person is credited with the creation of the scientific name of a previously unnamed taxon.
For the sake of information retrieval, the author citation and year appended to the scientific name, e.g. genus-species-author-year, genus-author-year, family-author-year, etc., is often considered a "de-facto" unique identifier, although this usage may often be imperfect.
For example, the taxa that the red admiral butterfly can be assigned to is as follows: In the first attempt to provide international rules for zoological nomenclature in 1895,[2] the author was defined as the author of the scientific description, and not as the person who provided the name (published or unpublished), this was the usual practice in the nomenclature of various animal groups before.
As a result, some disciplines such as malacology required a change in authorship regarding their taxonomic names as they had been attributed to persons who had never published a scientific work.
This new rule was not sufficiently precise, so in the following decades, taxonomic practice continued to diverge among disciplines and authors.
The ambiguity led a member of the ICZN Commission in 1974 to provide a more clear interpretation in the second edition of the Code (effective since 1961).
[3] The current view among some taxonomists restricts authorship for a taxonomic name to the person who wrote the textual scientific content of the original description.
In the 1800s it was the usual style to eventually set an abbreviation of another author immediately below the text of the description to indicate authorship.
In a strict application of the Code, the taxon name author string components "genus," "species," and "year" can only have one combination of characters.
The first letter is normally spelled in upper-case, however, initial capitalization and usage of accessory terms can be inconsistent (e.g. de Wilde/De Wilde, d'Orbigny/D'Orbigny, Saedeleer/De Saedeleer, etc.).
The author can either be spelled following a self-made standard (Linnaeus 1758, Linnaeus 1766),[5] or as given in the original source which implies that names of persons are not always spelled consistently (Linnæus 1758, Linné 1766),[6] or we are dealing with composed data sets without any consistent standard.
[7] In some publications, the author responsible for new names and nomenclatural acts is not stated directly in the original source, but can sometimes be inferred from reliable external evidence.
Recommendation 51D of the Code states: "...if the authorship is known or inferred from external evidence, the name of the author, if cited, should be enclosed in square brackets to show the original anonymity".
In Australia, a program was created (TAXAMATCH)[9] that provides a tool to indicate in a preliminary manner whether two variants of a taxon name should be accepted as identical or not according to the similarity of the cited author strings.
However, author names that are spelled very similarly but in fact represent different persons, and who independently authored identical taxon names, will not be adequately separated by this program; examples include "O. F. Müller 1776" vs. "P. L. S. Müller 1776", "G. B. Sowerby I 1850" vs. "G. B. Sowerby III 1875" and "L. Pfeiffer 1856" vs. "K. L. Pfeiffer 1956", so additional manual inspection is also required, especially for known problem cases such as those given above.
A further cause of errors that would not be detected by such a program include authors with multi-part surnames which are sometimes inconsistently applied in the literature, and works where the accepted attribution has changed over time.
Taxonomists often created unwritten rules for authorships of sensu names to record the first and original source for a misidentification of an animal, but this is not in accordance with the Code.