Talk:Author citation (zoology)

Full citation

I have deleted the following passage because I did not understand what was meant and assumed it was incorrect:

Full citation should be restricted to taxonomic publications: a full citation of this last species is

Branta albifrons Scopoli, 1769, Annus I Hist.-Nat. 69.

I am not aware that more than genus-species-author-year should be given in a taxon name author string. --FranciscoWelterSchultes (talk) 23:58, 14 July 2010 (UTC)

Text fixing

I have removed the passage on "anonymous dates", and also the reference to date treatment (date is a different topic and cannot be compared with author, date has a more detailed guide in Art. 21-22 with a slightly different philosophy behind). The Official Lists and Indexes should not be taken as a guide here because they contain names and spellings from old sources that are not in accordance with the 4th edition (they are not updated with new Code editions, they may also contain entirely outdated authorships and dates). The 4th edition has no provision to spell the date in a form [1807] with square brackets (Art. 22). If usage of square brackets for dates were within the Code's provisions, then the Code would have to explain exactly in which situation the square bracket would be used for the date (only in case of no date given, or also if a different or incorrect date was given, and from where exactly the original date should be taken - title page (when issued?), footnotes, plates, later issues of the same series...?).

Recommendation 51D is cool because it is inserted at an incorrect position in the Code (51.2.1 name of a subsequent user, but refers to 51.2). Art. 50.1 should contain a reference to citation of anonymous authorships.

Replaced the term "ICZN-sanctioned Code" by "examples given in the Code" because it is important to distinguish between the examples and the legislative core text of the Code.

I re-inserted the examples "G. B. Sowerby I 1850" vs. "G. B. Sowerby III 1875" and "L. Pfeiffer 1856" vs. "K. L. Pfeiffer 1956" in the taxamatch section, this is useful to illustrate that the manual step is indeed important. It is the manual step that will create the workload. (Dick Petit and I found some examples where same genus-species combinations were established by authors with the same surname - taxamatch could be useful here but does not suggest non-similarity in those cases). Same genus-species combinations authored by very similar authors did occur, this is not "very unlikely". It is not difficult to find examples. As we can imagine, the horizon of the Sowerbys and Pfeiffers (they were all malacologists) was very similar and they established over and over again the same names repeatedly in the same genera. I would not be able to count how often they established Helix major. In practical life these names are not considered as very important (but also here we have exceptions), but it depends on which kind of database you like to interconnect.

Maybe we can lump the 2 chapters "initials" and "Implications for information retrieval" to a joint chapter "Initials and variant spellings"? --FranciscoWelterSchultes (talk) 11:12, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

Re-wording for clarity

I went through the short description and some other sub sections to rephrase some sentences for clarity - different meanings of 'author' were not differentiated properly. Still needs a massive overhaul of repetitive language. Persephae (talk) 23:36, 2 January 2024 (UTC)