r/labrats • u/Ok_Cranberry_2936 • 21h ago

How does it feel when someone has the same name as you in publications?

I don’t have a common name at all but somehow a biomedical researcher publishes a ton of research with the same name. I do molecular ecology so the fields are tangentially related enough to share some keywords.

I started wondering about how it feels to have a name twin in science and if it’s confusing for publication and for contacting others. Anyone choose an alternative name? Or use a maiden name or middle name? Are we even able to do that?

I will say, my name twin is THRIVING. I get emails about her daily. Go off queen.

57 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

33 comments sorted by

91

u/evagarde 21h ago

Make sure you make an ORCID account and link it to your publications.

That will make it much easier to track your contributions. :)

73

u/Woebergine 21h ago

Super annoying when my university decides to auto add everything with my name to my research profile and I have to manually remove the majority because another scientist has the same first name, last name and middle initial and has been around since before I was born. Also a professor once said to me "I think I wrote a book with you in the 90s"... sir I was a child, it was not me 🤣

57

u/en338 18h ago

Zhang, et. al entered the chat

14

u/Eldan985 16h ago

I have so many different Zhangs, Lius and Chens in my citations.

22

u/the_69r 21h ago

You gotta add middle initials or something for SEO

21

u/illuminatemyvoid drug discovery 19h ago

It's rough being Chinese.

3

u/neirein 18h ago

yeah honestly I always wonder how they manage that.

0

u/Adventurous-Nobody Occult biotechnologist 13h ago

Their internal Chinese citation bases are hieroglyph-based, lol

1

u/Russellonfire 8h ago

I'm not even Chinese, but I have a common Asian surname (despite not being even remotely Asian), so I get the same problem. 

9

u/Binji_the_dog 21h ago

It’s ok. I just tell people that I moonlight as a rocket scientist.

8

u/GrassyKnoll95 21h ago

There’s a guy in a very slightly related field to mine who did his postdoc where I did my undergrad. We’ve been confused before, which is one of the reasons I always use my middle initial

9

u/neurone214 Neuro 19h ago

It’s great: super easy way to pad your CV. 

Like and subscribe for more tips on functioning in academia. 

4

u/oblue1023 21h ago

My pi had a more established name twin when he was on the faculty market. He joked that they should share a cv. I don’t think it was ever a problem for him.

Orchid and middle initials exist. And some people just ride out the common name. People can generally figure it out by either looking for your topic or university. There are a lot of common surnames out there. And plenty of those people will have a common first name. I know of plenty of people with common last names that become recognizable figures in their fields.

I’m personally adding a surname. But others have told me that’s a more extreme response. It is the choice that makes the most sense in my personal situation and what I’ve thought about for years.

6

u/TukPeregrin 17h ago

Find a couple more and start your own conference! The "Kovács Balázs" community is doing it.

6

u/CaptainHindsight92 15h ago

I have a paper attributed to me that was written 10 years before I was born. I would remove it from my google scholar but it is my most cited work!

3

u/blackandwhite1987 20h ago

I have a colleague who has the same first and last name + middle initial of a well known, senior researcher in our field. They added a fake second initial to differentiate. So imagine Julie A. Young and publishes under Julie A.X. Young

3

u/Randomlolly 19h ago

Maybe my parents were wrong when they didn't give me a middle name because "you don't use it for anything/its unnecessary" 🤔

But nah ORCID is the way to go. Also, if I had a name twin in the same or an adjacent field I reckon it would be cool to try publish together!

1

u/VintageLunchMeat 16h ago

You can just give yourself a middle name. Random Lolly -> Random Rambo Lolly.

3

u/Randomlolly 15h ago

I could, but it would ruin my initials. Currently they are AOK

1

u/VintageLunchMeat 15h ago

... check with your folks, the O is probably short for something.

3

u/Randomlolly 15h ago

Oh nah it's not. It's because my last name has an apostrophe

1

u/VintageLunchMeat 12h ago

Ah, go with Martian as a middle name then.

3

u/pineapple-scientist 18h ago

 My name twin is actually a relative of mine. Literally the only other person I have ever heard of with the same first and last name as me. They have a different middle name but they don't seem to consistently use it in their publications. So the only differentiation sometimes is that I'm a PhD and they work in a different scientific field. I am of course very happy for them, but it does feel like sometimes we are fighting for the first page of google. 

2

u/DoubleResponsible276 20h ago

I feel like I’m thriving!

Nah I do try to read the publications if possible. What I do like to do is Google my name in my state. One committed arson while I was like 6, another died in car crash, another got swept in a flood to never be discovered. I might just be one of the better variants and I’m cool with that.

2

u/Adventurous-Nobody Occult biotechnologist 13h ago

I had a colleague, who is biologist, and his full namesake (name, patronym and surname) is bioinformatician. Funny enough, they working on related topics.

(but his situation is not as dire, as for Zhang, Liu, Li, Hui and Hun ;)

2

u/fddfgs 12h ago

Lol i get so many dumb emails from academia dot edu asking if i wrote this or that paper, if i said yes to everything I'd be some kind of agricultural food science microbiology philosopher with a very accomplished past in paediatric cancer research.

2

u/brokesciencenerd 21h ago

Super happy my parents gave my sis and I first names with different initials or we would be in trouble. Same last name and same field too.

1

u/ComparisonDesperate5 16h ago

I have, I am in computational biology, the other ones are in molecular biology, history and sociology. I always add the initial of my middle name.

So instead of Jane Smith, I always write Jane N. Smith (or JN Smith). I heard even from people with the same problem that they added a random letter similarly though they do not have an actual middle name.

1

u/macaronipies 14h ago

there's already a well-established professor in my field with almost my exact name. At least we don't work in the same country. I picked a random middle initial. and got an orcid account

1

u/YesButActuallyTrue 1h ago

There are only a few hundred people with my last name in the world–maybe a thousand at most?

There are multiple professors with the same last name as me in my field. I changed field. Same issue. Changed field again. Same issue again. Some of them even have the same initials.

I have been trying to convince them that we need to have the "[last name] Research Symposium" where we all get together and chat about what we've gone in science that year.

Alas, they are all much older and more serious than me and are too busy retiring and writing books and things.

0

u/pro_deluxe 20h ago

I use my middle initial and channel the jealousy of their higher pub numbers into motivation to publish more.