This function accepts a scientific name and author combination as input and returns the canonical form of the name. The canonical form represents the primary nomenclatural components of a scientific name combination that can be used for comparing lexical equivalence among name strings. Author and nomenclatural information is removed. Our current canonical concept definition also omits subgenus when creating a canonical name. This function utilizes a author name prefix lexicon to omit lower case family names ("van de Castle," "di Rossi," etc.)

Examples

Canonical forms are automatically created within NameBank when a name combination is indexed and are a component of NameBank lexical groups with a lexical source qualifier of 'cf."