I am not sure it is any "better". Even a smaller improvement (e.g. using for (@author) { ... } instead of the C-style loop can please someone.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

my $author = 'Smith, Kristin A.; Shirley, Mark Harper ; Saff, David ; 
+Ernst, Michael D.; Patrick, Nicholas J. M ; van der Loede, Greg; Yu, 
+(Jeffrey) Hu; De La Macorra, F ; Smith, Meghan. ';

$author =~ s/.\s*$//;

print((join ', ', map {
    join ' ', reverse split / *, */;
} split / *; */, $author), '.');
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