Value of Author Citations
As stated in the Introduction, the most valuable initial function of author citations in biology is probably to distinguish between homonyms, in other words taxa which coincidentally share the same name but in fact represent different entities; in these situations the inclusion of the taxon authorship is sufficient to distinguish between them in most cases. Additional benefits of knowing the authorship of a taxon name include grouping of taxa by describing or revising author/s, thus permitting (for example) the study of a given biologist's nomenclatural activity through time (although this is easier in zoology than botany since the year is normally omitted in botanical citations); and, in many cases, to point in a preliminary way to the work in which the original description or new combination was published - again easier in zoology than botany on account of the publication year being normally included in zoological citations, but available one step removed in botany via recourse to resources such as Index Nominum Genericorum (for genus-level names), the International Plant Name Index, Index Fungorum, and similar compilations of both nomenclatural and bibliographic information for botanical taxon names.
Read more about this topic: Author Citation (botany)
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