 The discovery that the golden white-eye was indeed a white-eye and not a honeyeater, based on behavioural observations by H. Douglas Pratt and the genetic research of Charles Sibley and Jon E. Ahlquist, was the impetus for the resolution of the Bonin white-eye's family placement.Sibley came to suspect that this meant that the Bonin white-eye had been similarly misassigned to the honeyeaters.Hiroyoshi Higuchi independently had reached the same conclusion, and so Higuchi and Keisuke Ueda obtained specimens for Sibley, who enlisted Mark S. Springer to analyse them using RNA sequencing.