Jan
13
Who-o-o are you? Who who? Who who?
Image by Danny McL via Flickr
There’s been quite a lot of discussions going on lately about author identification: Raf Aerts’ correspondence piece in Nature (doi:10.1038/453979b), discussions on FriendFeed, ... The issue is that it can be hard to identify who the actual author of a paper is if their name is very common. If your name is Gudmundur Thorisson (“hi, mummi”) you’re in luck. But if you are a Li Y, Zhang L or even an Aerts J it’s a bit harder. Searching PubMed for “Aerts J” returns 299 papers. I surely don’t remember writing that many. I wish… So if a future employer would search pubmed for my name they will not get a list of my papers, but a list of papers by authors that have my name. Also, some of my papers mention jan.aerts@bbsrc.ac.uk as the contact email.
There’s been quite a lot of discussions going on lately about author identification: Raf Aerts’ correspondence piece in Nature (doi:10.1038/453979b), discussions on FriendFeed, ... The issue is that it can be hard to identify who the actual author of a paper is if their name is very common. If your name is Gudmundur Thorisson (“hi, mummi”) you’re in luck. But if you are a Li Y, Zhang L or even an Aerts J it’s a bit harder. Searching PubMed for “Aerts J” returns 299 papers. I surely don’t remember writing that many. I wish… So if a future employer would search pubmed for my name they will not get a list of my papers, but a list of papers by authors that have my name. Also, some of my papers mention jan.aerts@bbsrc.ac.uk as the contact email.
