After checking the regional publications, you search those of adjacent states. If they are not present in other states on India go for the publications of the adjacent countries.

If there is an expert you definitely take his/her view.

Mr Bandyopadhyays reply is a good start.

I am in Sweden and so often lacking both literature and published papers on a long list of species. It's not uncommon that I have to look at Russian soures for insects.

So yes adjacent countries is the second thing to do, as for birds there's a number of cases with variable plumage. The worst case that comes to mind is a bird considered to be two species, but it turned out to be one and the same even though one population looked completely different revealed by thefact that the calls were the same.

Sometime it takes time, a leech is still a record holder - it took 4 years to identify it - Theromyzon maculosum. And then with information from Canada

...I did other work meanwhile of course! :)

If everything else fails, go back to basics with field studies, what is the habitat choice, behaviour/etology and see if any revealeing characteristic turn up.

At the end of the day it's humans who decide what is a new species, or subspecies.

@Sibasish Sahoo

Please keep in mind there is difference between 'new record' and 'new species'.

In your main question you are telling about new species and about new record in the write-up

@Subir sir, new species refers to new species record to an area, sorry for lack of info.

In this case, literature and on line data bank also useful to make right conclusion. the advise of an experienced taxonomist also helps well

Hello Mr. Sahoo; Try to establish an acquaintance with experts in the groups that you are interested in. Curators of regional museums, zoologists in local colleges and national scientific societies all are familiar with the experts. You will also need clear photographs and/or legally acquired specimens to show these experts. Detailed location data must be included with any request for identification. When you have the name of an expert, be sure to ask BEFORE you send them any material. Best regards, Jim Des Lauriers

Hi,

also consider Barcoding ("genetic fingerprinting") the problematic individual/species.

Many countries do have their databases, and there is also BOLDsystems and GenBank which hort immense amounts of data to compare the DNA sequence of your "new" individual with entries from species/subspecies/etc.

Professional labs provide genetic analyses at reasonable costs, or you could also consider cooperation with labs in your region (universities, museums, etc).

Cheers Florian

In addition to all other suggestions you can also talk to any reliable native senior or experienced herpetologist or ornithologist or any active researcher of that particular area who have worked extensively and actively involve till date in reaearch, you can make personal communication for more investigation of any new record or species. But take care that u dont give all information to any unreliable pepole because they can publish you work with out your permission or knowledge before you. For reptiles you can visit Reptile database and many other sites, you must also refer old published books of fauna of your research place (some researchers ignores referring old publication and focus more on latest). You must take adequate data eg in reptiles scalations, length, location, activity period, ecological niche, food, habitat, behaviour and compare with the closest look alike species to clear the confusion of new record or new species. Good luck.