Thanks @bouteloua for your comments. I wasn’t really trying to suggest that iNat should be able to determine automatically that an observation is a new distribution record but more so that if a user could check a box that indicated that it was in order to provide the iNat number crunchers something new to report as an accomplishment of the system. I understand the problem that some people will erroneously report an observation as a new record when it might not be. Perhaps there could be two levels to it. One where a user could denote the observation as an unconfirmed distribution record and one where it could be denoted as a confirmed distribution record. The user could provide a link to the published record for proof or have testimony by an expert or something along those lines.
Currently, I use a “Distribution Record” tag for mine and add text in the description of my observations that are records. I indicate if they were published or not. A couple have expert iNat user testimony indicating the record in the comment section of the observation.