scientificName: with or without authors?

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According to Darwin Core definition, the scientificName term is:
The full scientific name, with authorship and date information if known. When 
forming part of an Identification, this should be the name in lowest level 
taxonomic rank that can be determined.
http://rs.tdwg.org/dwc/terms/index.htm#scientificName

Thus, if you have the authorship in your database, you should include in the 
scientificName field. In practice though, I see a lot of people (including 
myself) populate the field without the authors. I asked Laura Russell from 
VertNet (zoology), and that seems very common there too. It is also included as 
an example in for the term: Ambystoma tigrinum diaboli" (genus + 
specificEpithet + infraspecificEpithet)

I remember there was a TDWG discussion about this (will try to find the link at 
some point), but I am now wondering if I should change our dataset, and more 
importantly what I should suggest to my community. John, what do you suggest to 
VertNet members? Are they ignoring your advise?

Original issue reported on code.google.com by [email protected] on 9 Feb 2012 at 9:27

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Original comment by [email protected] on 9 Feb 2012 at 9:28

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Thinking about this a little bit, I think the best way to see scientificName 
is: Provide all the information you have about that scientific name string in 
your database, within limits of your database (e.g. if you only have a 
scientificNameWithoutAuthor field and a scientificNameAuthor field and you 
cannot concatenate, so be it).

So, scientificName is: genus + species + speciesAuthor + " subsp. " + 
subspecies + subspeciesAuthor + " var. " + variety + varietyAuthor, and so on.

Some of these parts cannot be provided anywhere else but in the scientificName. 
In the example above that would be speciesAuthor, subspecies & 
subspeciesAuthor. Having nice searchable names is not the goal of 
scientificName. For that we have genus + specificEpithet + infraspecificEpithet 
+ scientificNameAuthorship and if those are not provided, we can still parse 
the scientificName.

If you agree, I'll change the way we publish our names and suggest this to the 
Canadensys community and in AppleCore.

Original comment by [email protected] on 9 Feb 2012 at 10:12

• Changed title: scientificName: with or without authors?