what is the authority of a name in zoology
Author citation (zoology) In Australia a program was created (TAXAMATCH)[11] that provides a helpful tool to indicate in a preliminary manner whether two variants of a taxon name should be accepted as identical or not, according to the similarity of the cited author strings. The authority matching function of TAXAMATCH is useful to assign a moderate-to-high similarity to author strings with minor orthographic and/or date differences, such as "Medvedev & Chernov, 1969" vs. "Medvedev & Cernov, 1969", or "Schaufuss, 1877" vs. "L. W. Schaufuss, 1877", or even "Oshmarin, 1952" vs. "Oschmarin in Skrjabin & Evranova, 1952", and a low similarity to author citations which are very different (for example "Hyalesthes Amyot, 1847" vs. "Hyalesthes Signoret, 1865") and are more likely to represent different publication instances, and therefore possibly also different taxa. The program also understands standardized abbreviations as used in Botany and sometimes in Zoology as well, for example "Rchb." for Reichenbach, however may still fail for non-standard abbreviations (such as "H. & A. Ad." for H. & A. Adams, where the normal citation would in fact be "Adams & Adams"); such non-standard abbreviations must then be picked up by subsequent manual inspection after the use of algorithmic approach to pre-sort the names to be matched into groups of either more or less similar names and cited authorities. However, author names which are spelled very similarly but in fact represent different persons, and who independently authored identical taxon names, will not be adequately separated by this program; examples include "O. F. Müller 1776" vs. "P. L. S. Müller 1776", "G. B. Sowerby I 1850" vs. "G. B. Sowerby III 1875" and "L. Pfeiffer 1856" vs. "K. L. Pfeiffer 1956", so additional manual inspection is also required, especially for known problem cases such as those given above.