 The smelt-whitings are Perciformes in the suborder Percoidei.The species was first identified and named "Sillago ingenuua" by Roland McKay in his comprehensive 1985 review of the family Sillaginidae, with the holotype collected near Chantaburi, in the Gulf of Thailand in 1975.Prior to this official naming, the species had been misidentified as "Sillago argentifasciata" by Shao and Chang in 1978 and again in 1980 by Dutt and Sujatha.