- When providers had a text blob for the name, separate from the text blob for the authorship, they could concatenate the two for presentation in scientificName, and also provide the authorship bit in scientificNameAuthorship, and the consumers could easily strip the authorship from scientificName to produce the functional equivalent of a canonical name.
this does not work for autonyms in botany, i.e. the infraspecific taxa where the infraspecific epithet and the specific epithet are the same. Here the author is before the infraspecific epithet. Inconvenient, but prevents the simplest solution.