Rich, it is not a question of __formatting__; concatenation is just not possible, you have to parse into EVERY name, take it apart, determine whether it is an autonym, and if so __insert__ the author at the correct position for botanical names.
Yes, but that's the responsibility of the provider. Either they have the information sufficiently atomized to populate verbatimScientificName appropriately for autonyms, or they just have a pre-formatted "scientificNameWithAuthorship" (which can go in verbatimScientificName), or they do not have autonyms appropriately formatted, in which case we can't really do anything for them.
Thus, the expected content would be: verbatimScientificName: Lobelia spicata Lam. var. spicata scientificName: Lobelia spicata var. spicata scientificNameAuthorship: Lam.
I understand this is tough on Zoologists :-), but I therefore propose
Actually, it's the botanists who are making things tough in this case... :-)
verbatimScientificName scientificName scientificNameAuthorship, scientificNameWithAuthorship
This covers all cases in my opinion. The comments should express, that scientificNameWithAuthorship should follow allow canonical name rules and recommendations of the respective Code.
I'm still not convinced we need scientificNameWithAuthorship.
Aloha, Rich