The scientific signature: author's name

UAB Recommendations for the scientific signature

Recommendations to UAB authors regarding the author’s name and the research output affiliation (in Catalan)

General recommendations

• Choose one among the possible variants of your name and be consistent with it. 
• Use an author identifier that will persist with all your name variants. We highly recommend that authors create an ORCID ID.
• Incorporate your author’s institutional affiliation. In the case of multiple affiliations, all of them must be included.
• Check your author name in bibliographic databases and unify all your name variants if possible.
• Add the multiple variants of your author’s name when registering for your author identifier code.
• If possible, add the ORCID identifier next to your name when your paper is published.

Why is it important?

• The use of an author Profile avoids the ambiguity of personal names derived from cultural conventions. For example, it is common for Anglo-Saxon bibliographic databases to identify authors only by the last surname and the rest of the name appears in abbreviated form (given name and first surname).
• The use of a unique and consistent author name guarantees that publications are associated with the correct author.
• The attribution of research output depends on the correct association of academic publishing - author - institutional affiliation. The existence of different ways to designate a person and / or an institution often implies errors in the monitoring of research output by the University.
• A precise affiliation favours the visibility of centres and institutions and ensures the reliability of the research output indicators.

Other suggestions

• FECYT recommendations (in Spanish)