Author Citation (zoology) - Identity of The Author(s)

Identity of The Author(s)

The identity of the author had long been a matter of dispute and of secondary importance. In the first attempt to provide international rules for zoological nomenclature in 1895, the author was defined as the author of the scientific description, and not as the person who provided the name (published or unpublished), as had been usual practice in various animal groups before. This had the result that in some disciplines, for example in malacology, most taxonomic names had to change their authorship because they had been attributed to other persons who never published a scientific work.

This new rule was however not sufficiently accurate and did not provide an exact guide, so that in the following decades taxonomic practice continued to diverge among disciplines and authors. The ambiguous situation led a member of the ICZN Commission in 1974 to provide an interpretation of Art. 50 of the second edition of the Code (effective since 1961), where the author had been defined as "the person who first publishes a scientific name in a way that satisfies the criteria of availability", an interpretation following which this should be seen as largely being restricted to providing a description or diagnosis.

Currently most (but not all) taxonomists accept this view and restrict authorship for a taxonomic name to the person who was responsible for having written the textual scientific content of the original description, or in other words, the visibly responsible person for having written down what the publisher finally published. The author of an image is not recognized as co-author of a name, even if the image was the only base provided for making the name available.

The author is usually the author of the work. But sometimes new zoological names were not established by that author.

If a true author of a written text is not directly recognisable in the original publication, she or he is not the author of a name (but the author of the work is). The text could actually be written by a different person. Some authors have copied text passages from unpublished sources without acknowledging them. In Art. 50.1.1 all these persons are excluded from the authorship of a name, if they were not explicitly mentioned in the work itself for being the responsible persons for making a name available.

Most taxonomists also accept Art. 50.1.1 that the author of a cited previously published source, from which text passages were copied, is not acknowledged as the author of a name.

Not all taxonomists seem to know this, and there are traditions in some animal groups (for example in fish nomenclature) where the "true" author of a work is still occasionally cited in the name of a species ("Walbaum (ex Klein), 1792").

In some cases the author of the description can differ from the author of the work. This must be explicitly indicated in the original publication, either by a general statement ("all zoological descriptions in this work were written by Smith"), or by an individual statement ("the following three descriptions were provided by Jiménez", "this name shall be attributed to me and Wang because she contributed to the description").

In the 1800s it was a usual style to eventually set an abbreviation of another author immediately below the text of the description or diagnosis to indicate authorship for the description. This is commonly accepted today: if the description is attributed to a different person, then that person is the author.

When the name of a different author was only set behind the new name in the headline (and not repeated below the diagnosis to indicate that that diagnosis had been written by that person), this was a convention to indicate authorship only for the new name and not for the description. These authorships for names are not covered by Art. 50.1 and are not accepted. Only authorship for the description is accepted.

Prior to 1900-1920 there were several different conventions concerning the authorships, every animal group had other traditions. This is why we frequently find other authors than today for zoological names in the early zoological literature. Art. 50.1 has been a quite successful model since it became commonly accepted in the mid-1900s. There is no need to research who the true author was, everyone including young and relatively unexperienced researchers can verify and determine the name of the author in the original work itself.