Just noticed today that on the species pages it doesn’t say the scientific authority for any mentioned species. It’s a pretty small thing that basically every taxonomic database and their mothers has so I find it odd that we as a massive taxonomic database do not. Wouldn’t be too tough of a change …

I would be interested in seeing a discussion on this. As a biologist I’m accustomed to seeing it as an extension of the name, but I seldom use it myself. Botanists in particular seem to expect it, but is it just a convention that makes them comfortable, or does it convey useful information?

Adding the author’s correctly, consistently, probably would be an added source of spelling, formatting and programming error. On the other hand there are numerous hemi-homonyms with names under e.g a fish or a plant. There are seven perfect hemo-homonyms, similar genus and species which cannot be te…

and the holy grail being the chance to get a link to at least the plates depicting the species or - forbidden dream for specialists - the keys. Not sure about copyright issues though.

Botanists expect it as strictly the Author is part of the Scientific Name. It is thus possible to have several identical names that have different authors and thus different species. Knowing the author thus allows one to know which species concept is under consideration. However, for most users …

alternatively, i really don’t want to see it (despite being more or less a botanist), i find it clutter and furthermore don’t really agree that a person’s name should be attached to a species like that. I don’t have a problem with it as an option but please at least keep it in a discrete text field …

I’d really enjoy seeing this.

I feel like it would just be nice to have somewhere in the about tab on species pages. That way it wouldn’t generate unnecessary data when booting stuff over from inat but still allowing people to see when and by whom a species was described.

[image] blazeclaw: I feel like it would just be nice to have somewhere in the about tab on species pages. For vascular plants at least, this is just a single click away. On the right-hand side of the About tab, click on the IPNI+POWO link. This takes you to the International Plant Names Ind…

Yeah, this. The existence of more-or-less comprehensive species catalogs has rather diminished the importance of having the authority tacked on to the name–at least in plants, it’s relatively rare for authors to accidentally generate homonyms nowadays. But it would be a BIG maintenance burden. My cu…

I was actually just creating a post about this very topic. I would very much like to see scientific authors listed somewhere on the taxon page. Not necessarily following the scientific name in the header, but somewhere easily found on the page.

Scientific Authority on Species Pages

Feature Requests

bouteloua February 1, 2020, 7:14pm 12

Closing to focus at the existing topic for this requested feature: https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/include-author-citations-for-taxa/671

Topic		Replies	Views
Include author citations for taxa Feature Requests declined	26	3118	June 3, 2023
Add date of publication to synonyms Feature Requests web	6	849	July 14, 2020
When Different Taxonomic Authorities Disagree (Especially About Plants) Nature Talk question , taxonomy	29	2360	April 4, 2022
Authors of papers requesting species additions to iNat database Curators	15	1324	September 25, 2019
Is there a way to find the authors behind the scientific names used on iNat? General question	4	704	August 30, 2021

Scientific Authority on Species Pages

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