Should animal clade names above genus level be italicized?

[Infinity Blade]

The following describes what is, in practice, standard procedure on when to italicize scientific names in phylogeny.

Italics are used for bacterial and viral taxa at the level of family and below. All bacterial and many viral genes are italicized. Serovars of Salmonella enterica are not italicized.

For organisms other than bacteria, fungi, and viruses, scientific names of taxa above the genus level (families, orders, etc.) should be in roman type.

wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/page/scientific-nomenclature


However, recently it has been argued that scientific names at all taxonomic ranks should be italicized, and the ICZN is currently the only code to not recommend this for clades above the genus level in zoology.

It is common practice in scientific journals to print genus and species names in italics. This is not only historical as species names were traditionally derived from Greek or Latin. Importantly, it also facilitates the rapid recognition of genus and species names when skimming through manuscripts. However, names above the genus level are not always italicized, except in some journals which have adopted this practice for all scientific names. Since scientific names treated under the various Codes of nomenclature are without exception treated as Latin, there is no reason why names above genus level should be handled differently, particularly as higher taxon names are becoming increasingly relevant in systematic and evolutionary studies and their italicization would aid the unambiguous recognition of formal scientific names distinguishing them from colloquial names. Several leading mycological and botanical journals have already adopted italics for names of all taxa regardless of rank over recent decades, as is the practice in the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants, and we hereby recommend that this practice be taken up broadly in scientific journals and textbooks.

imafungus.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s43008-020-00048-6

Most of my profiles italicize everything (I was unaware of the ICZN's rules until recently), although before I found the paper above I actually went out of my way to edit just a few of my profiles in accordance to the ICZN's rules.

The question, then, is what should be done?

[creature386]

I admit that I didn't think much about this before. I always found it more confusing that you sometimes capitalize family names and above and sometimes not (i.e. Tyrannosauridae is capitalized if you refer to the whole group and not if you refer to a tyrannoaurid or tyranosaurids). But I can see why italics would be helpful here for consistency.