Dicraeosauridae was named by Huene (1927).

It was synonymized subjectively with Atlantosauridae by Bonaparte (1978); it was reranked as the unranked clade Dicraeosauridae by Tschopp et al. (2015) and Mannion et al. (2019).

It was assigned to Sauropoda by Kuhn (1946); to Homalosauropodidae by Huene (1948); to Homalosauropodoidea by Kuhn (1966); to Sauropoda by Molnar (1992); to Sauropoda by Huene (1927), Galton (1977), Bonaparte (1986), Bonaparte (1996) and Bonaparte (1999); to Diplodocimorpha by Salgado et al. (2006); to Diplodocoidea by Upchurch (1995), Upchurch (1995), Hunt et al. (1995), Wilson and Smith (1996), Sereno (1997), Upchurch (1997), Sereno (1998), Wilson and Sereno (1998), Sereno (1999), Sereno et al. (1999), Wilson (2002), Upchurch et al. (2004), Salgado and Coria (2005), Remes (2006), Suteethorn et al. (2010) and Wilson and Allain (2015); and to Flagellicaudata by Harris and Dodson (2004), Gallina and Apesteguía (2005), Taylor and Naish (2005), Rauhut et al. (2005), Apesteguía (2007), Whitlock (2011), Ibiricu et al. (2012), Tschopp and Mateus (2013), Tschopp et al. (2015) and Mannion et al. (2019).