In defense of the use of italic for latin binomial plant names

Abstract

The author surveyed the instructions for authors in 110 botanical journals to assess how widely italic is used to represent the Latin binomial names of plants. Except for one journal that eliminated italic from the reference list, all of these journals published articles that used italic in the text and reference list for Latin binomial names of plants. However, in their instructions for authors only 48% of these journals explicitly requested the use of italic to denote the Latin binomial names of plants.