The authorship of a taxonomic name refers to the publication in which the author validly and effectively proposed a new name, recombined it or changed its rank.

In zoology the scientific name is followed by the author(s) who described the species first (protonym) with the year when the said original description has been validly published. For instance, “Turbo duplicatus Linnaeus, 1758” indicates that Turbo duplicatus was first described by Linnaeus in a publication issued in 1758.

The parentheses added around Linnaeus, 1758 in Turritella duplicata (Linnaeus, 1758) indicates that the taxon species has been then transferred to the taxon genus Turritella. However, the mention of Linnaeus, 1758 remains, clearly indicating that it was described first by Linnaeus in a publication issued in 1758.

In botany and mycology, the practice is slightly different, since the name of the author(s) (most of the time in a standardized abbreviated form) of a taxon follows the scientific name but without mentioning the year of its first publication (all the author names and their abbreviations are held in internationally accepted databases – e.g. the International Plant Names Index (IPNI) kept and maintained in the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew). When names are recombined or when the taxon changes rank, the author citation is composed of the author(s) of the basionym, given in parentheses, followed by the author(s) of the name itself (also without the year).

For instance, Rindera bungei (Boiss.) Gürke refers to a species bungei described first by Boissier (in 1875) in the genus Mattia and then moved into the genus Rindera by Gürke (in 1893) (Fig. 1).

The authorship of a scientific name not only identifies the taxon behind the name, it is also considered by most people and recognized as such by most machines in data mining, as a bibliographic reference to the original publication in which the taxon was described, i.e. to its initial taxonomic treatment (Agosti et al. in press), or the section of the text in the publication related to this name. Yet these references are not considered to be valid citations by publishers who will not include them in the reference section of articles. Sometimes, it is even the author who does not consider it as a reference (Meier 2016) and does not provide the full reference to the journal.

Either way, the various inconsistent practices related to the citation of taxon authorships lead to inconsistencies and ultimately confusion (Fig. 2, from Bénichou et al. 2018). Such inconsistencies lead to inconsistent linking in the article, with some authorities linked to their bibliographic reference while others for which the reference is not provided are left unlinked (Fig. 3, from Bénichou et al. 2018).

The original source is therefore somehow dissociated from its current taxonomic treatment (Agosti et al. in press), limiting and obscuring scientific discussions, the digital-automated construction of citation networks or/and the development of relevant citation metrics (Nielsen et al. 2017) . These practices often require substantial effort to not only discover the bibliographic reference implicit in the authorship of a taxon (Fawcett et al. 2022), but also to get a copy of the cited publication (Page 2016).

These practices, in concealing the authorship of the scientific concept to which they refer (i.e. the discovery and description of the taxon), impede and bias the results of new machine data-mining. In the digital age and the era of the semantic web, in which building a citation network by machine is one of the emerging properties (Berners-Lee et al. 2001; Nielsen et al. 2017), it becomes crucial to link the scientific name used to its original description, both in a human- and machine-actionable way (Bénichou et al. 2021). This link should resolve at least to the article, and ideally to the respective treatments, and be accessible in an open access FAIR format rather than only as a PDF which impedes highly accurate data extraction (Goodman et al. 2018). Ideally, it should also include further links via persistent identifiers to any other biological data (e.g. morphological, molecular, ethological) constituting the taxon cited, thus allowing the use of text and data mining tools to extract traits. This will allow immediate access to facts and their sources provided by the author(s) to the entire scientific community and the societal world making use of such taxonomic data.

Provide each scientific name of a taxon (at least at its first mention in the paper) with authorship (and date), and add corresponding entries to the publication’s “Bibliographic references” section.