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Published online 13 February 2008 | Nature 451, 766-767 (2008) | doi:10.1038/451766a
News Feature
Scientific publishing: Identity crisis
Chinese authors are publishing more and more papers, but are they receiving due credit and recognition for their work? Not if their names get confused along the way. Jane Qiu reports.
Jia Wei, associate dean at the pharmacy school of Shanghai Jiao Tong University can remember hundreds of metabolic pathways by heart, but he gets confused by his graduate students' publications. Three of his students — Wang Xiao-yan, Wang Xiao-rong and Wang Xiao-xue (pictured above with Jia) have completely different two-character given names in Chinese, but all publish under the abbreviated name X.
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It's a terrific article but still misses a key point about chinese names: the government name policy doesn't allow a dash '-' between the two-character first (given) transliterated name in a passport or any other official documents, which makes any name with a dash in between the two-character first name not authentic at all.
There is a brighter side of this too. Name confusion may serve as a dampner in cases of temptation for committing scientific misconduct, because there will be not much incentive. A blessing in disguise!
Identity Crisis or Credit Communism? ------------------------------------------- The difficulty in identifying the real author for a scientific publication in the citation database is not any new finding. As a Chinese scientist who had suffered this identity crisis for years but felt powerless in changing the system I used an unnatural way to create my unique “scientific nameâ€.// I added the middle initial “V†to my name appeared in my scientific publications. This helps me to remove quite a significant number of publications that I wish to have but dare not to grab. Since Chinese spelling alphabets lack letter “U†and “Vâ€, the addition of “V†to a Chinese name would make it an unusual name but good for my scientific identity.// However, not many scientists really care about a true identity. Some even enjoy the name-ambiguous citation system because they can grab others publications into their names. As a matter of fact, such “credit communism†has created many super-productive scientists. If people do not believe this, just take a look of the “top†10 scientists created by Thompson Scientific. By the way, this problem was reported to Thompson Scientific (ISI) years ago. It even did not reply to me even after repeated inquiries.// The citation bubbles and the impact factor scam were both reported as serious problems in scientific communication and publishing. However, among my more than twenty or so submissions on these topics over the last three years, none was accepted by the mainstream journals including Nature.// To see a complete list of my publications on these topics, please go to a centralized location which lists these publications. I promise that they provide much more details and insights than you can see here or elsewhere.// http:im1.biz/CitationIF.htm// ------------ Shi V. Liu (SVL@logibio.com)
I think that a universal author DOI would be great, and it is not just about Chinese or Korean names as a recent letter to Nature pointed out. There are many Indians who prefer not to have surnames at all, since these can denote caste (which many find socially offensive) or an ancestral village (which may have long since disappeared) or an ancestral trade (which may be irrelevant). Many Indian "surnames" are just the father's name and in any case for the most part are vestiges of our recent colonial history. Having had to create a surname for a student when we submitted a paper to Physical Review, I know how much simpler it would have been if we had had an author DOI instead...