The genus was circumscribed by the French botanist Antoine Laurent Apollinaire Fée in an 1825 publication.

[7] In 2018,[8] Kraichak and colleagues, using a "temporal phylogenetic" approach to identify temporal bands for specific taxonomic ranks, proposed placing Fissurina as the type genus of Fissurinaceae, a family originally proposed by Brendan P. Hodkinson in 2012.

[9] This taxonomic proposal was rejected by Robert Lücking in a critical 2019 review of the temporal method for the classification of lichen-forming fungi, using this specific example to highlight several drawbacks of this approach.

[10] Fissurina is characterized by fissurine ascocarps (i.e., having a fissured or slit-like disc), poorly developed and non-carbonized or weakly carbonized exciples, and 1-8 spored asci that make thick-walled, trans-septate or muriform hyaline ascospores often with a halo.

Graphis differs from Fissurina by its carbonized, well-developed exciple (labia) and ascospores without a halo.