Academic Poll: Uniqueness

132 hits, of which 2 are mine. Curse you, SuperFamousOncogeneDude, curse you! *shakes fist*
Even with the middle initial I get 67. It looks like a completely different 67 (that is, a cursory inspection indicates that the person/people I share initials and lastname with never publish under just first initial and lastname, most likely because of SuperFamousOncogenDude).

Thanks to a fairly unique first and last name, I'm the only hit on ADS for last name and first initial. Last name only adds 3 more hits from some planetary scientist to my 84 (although they're almost all ATEL-type communications, not full papers).

Using two initials and my last name (which is what I prefer when writing papers) yields 86 hits on the ADS database, of which 79 are me and 7 are other people named E. Lund. (I restricted the search to the years I have been publishing; Google Scholar tells me of a plant biologist from the 1920s who had the same initials and last name as me.) The ADS database is smart enough to recognize that people sometimes use two initials and sometimes only one. Luckily for me, my surname is not common outside of Scandinavia.

Some of my colleagues are not so fortunate. A year ago we had three grad students in our group (two of them siblings, one of whom has since finished his masters degree and left) with the same F. Lastname, and two of the three had the same F. M. Lastname.

If the search was my last name and first initial, but not restricted to middle initials (my single publication was published without my middle initial) there were 1665 hits. If it was restricted to only S Olson without middle initials then it was 464. It looks I have the winning ratio (or is it losing???) so far!

This is a cool game! Thanks for the idea.
I haven't published anything so far. Searching in Psyndex and PsycInfo I come up with 5 results for my lastname and initial. Looks like the scientific world is waiting...? ;-)

I only get my own publications, I don't even have to use initials. My husband however shares his name (first AND last) with somebody who has worked on quite related stuff (as seen from an outside position, of course it's actually COMPLETELY different). It has happened a couple of times that he got emails meant for that guy instead. (That's what happens if you don't closely look at websites and just copy the email address...)

Related: See my post The Name Game.

Hope the baby gets well soon, best wishes,

B.

Seaching pubmed with my first initial and last name gave ~650 papers, of which 5 are mine (2 more aren't indexed yet woowoo).

After the first paper I figured out that using my middle initial might help (I have historically shied away from using it due to wanting to avoid at all costs being called "JJ"). Sadly it still didn't get included on 2 of the papers...

Anyhow by including my middle initial pubmed only returns two papers, both of which are mine.

138 ADS hits on Lastname alone, all of which are mine. Google Scholar finds 263 author hits on F-Lastname, with no false positives. (Scholar also find 227 author hits on Lastname with other first initials: mostly a cousin, some my father, the rest are mine with typos in the first initial.)

I have the amusing situation that there's another person in my field (astrophysics) with the same last name, and the same first name (but fortunately a different middle initial). We agreed almost as soon as I discovered him to always insist on having middle initials in author lists, but of course that doesn't help with the ADS searches. Anything about Bondi Accretion is not mine.

Also confusing: he's actually moved to my city, so people who know me in real life are running across his name here and there.

Harvard/SAO returns 141, of which none are mine. It doesn't help that I share an initial and last name with the late Sidney Coleman, a prolific theorist from Harvard.

INSPEC returns 7 with my middle initial, of which 6 are mine (the other one dates 12 years before I was born). With just my first initial, it pulls up 163, dominated again by Sidney Coleman. Mine are more recent, for obvious reasons.

I take it back, Harvard/SAO did find 7 of mine, they just weren't sorted properly by date.

Surname only: 1 other author (google scholar)
Surname + initial of first name: me only

And I publish with two name initials, due to the fact that my first boss had my same initials and we had to acknowledge grants in the form "AM was funded by..."

Then again, my surname is quite uncommon overall, not only in science.

Google Scholar gives 1,340 hits - alas not all unique papers :-). It takes until hit 42 before it's not one of my papers, though, or a citation thereto.

PubMed, more usefully :-), gives only me for 'mcnay ec.' I enjoy that! Even 'mcnay e' is only me (and picks up one more paper).

[More amusing: at one point a couple of years ago, I was teaching at Darden business school, my father was heading a business/management school in the UK, and my mother was running management workshops. My kid sister was studying for a business degree and managed to cite all three of us for one paper :).]

on all my publications, i used first name and last name.

if i search using first init and last name on ADS, i get 184 hits. 9 are papers i am on.

scrolling through the search results shows many with the same first name, but different field.

I occasionally worried about being so findable on e.g. Google - as far as I know, I'm the only Ewan McNay on the web - and more so at times when the first several hits were for gaming tournaments :). Now the first page is mostly professional stuff (including an oddly high ranking for a paper that I very much like that never got formally published, because my first postdoc mentor went psycho when I left.. that one I especially like!) and I'm more relaxed about it. Thankfully there's nothing I would be afraid of someone finding..

As there are only 5 living people in the world with my last name (and two of them are not yet teens), I don't have any difficulty. Though if my brother (same first initial) were to publish, then we'd have issues...

The person who writes the "news and views" column at Nature Biotechnology has the same first two initials and last name as me, and writes an article in every issue of the journal, it seems. I have no hope (although my one first-author paper comes up on the first page of the 567 Pubmed hits).

Also, I chose specifically to publish under my first and middle initial, rather than using my whole name, because of the well-documented effect of having a female name listed as the first author (a study in which the same paper was submitted to a journal under the names Joan Lastname and John Lastname found that Joan's paper received worse reviews and was less likely to be accepted). Since my name (Jessica) marks me as both female and relatively young, I've kept it off, with apologies to my parents who spent a lot of time choosing this perfectly reasonable girl's name.

I used the astrophysics site you gave, since I no longer have convenient free access to the Citation Index. That did include several of my papers in the top X that I looked at, along with a person with the same first initial (and who used to publish with only that initial rather than his different middle initial) who is in several of those x00 person experimental collaborations. I've known about him for years but never managed to meet him.

The citation index has someone with the same initials who works in medicine, and one or two others. My brother turned up someone in the Ann Arbor thesis database with the same first name and initial even though my name is not that common.

Even more disturbing is the detail that there is a real person with the same name as my blog persona. That is just plain weird.

ADS, searching either last name alone or f-initial+ last name turn up the same 23--all mine. But then the last name is Stemwedel and it pulls up only astro pubs, which comprise the majority of my pubs from my limited career. I should check and see if I have them all on my vita.

Now, Google Scholar for last name only in a relevant time window produces 47 of which 24 are mine and 14 are my daughter's [excluding ~10 "citations"]. Broader Google searching on the last name turns up wider variety of "stuff" including patents on which my husband was the atty, and even an acknowledgment to a son in a Economics paper.

Yes there are a few others with the last name publishing, but not a lot.

Last name & first initial: 2,202
Last name, first initial, & middle initial: 171
Last name, full first name, and middle initial: 46

On ADS if you search for my last name, first initial, you get all of my publications, and only my publications.

On the arXiv (all of it, not just my subfield), it only takes my last name to get just me.

I don't publish papers, so I can't really participate. But, I do have a remarkably uncommon last name. Its not crazy weird or impossible to pronounce or anything, there just aren't any of us, and it's quite handy really. Sure, I can't disappear in a phonebook. If I moved to NYC, I'd be the only one with my last name in the book.

A nationwide phonebook search with my first initial and last name provides 2 results, and the other one is my mother. (C. Orzel gets 32). My straight last name gets under 50k hits on Google. (Compared to 1.7 million for Orzel, a last name I've never seen anywhere else.) I figure this means that I don't have to go out of my way to look up old friends. It would be so much work for me to track down my old friend S. Brown. But he can find me (should he care) in an instant!

I have a very common name. There are a dozen other people in the U.S. with my first, middle and last names. (I got a letter seeking payment of taxes, plus penalties and fees, including the cost of sending said letter to 13 people with a matching name. Fortunately, I'm not the Robert Lee Hawkins they were looking for. ((Jedi mind trick)) ) There's a Robert L. Hawkins who works a block from where I live, but the "L." is not for "Lee."

The great majority of hits for "HAWKINS RL" are for someone else. Like 10 to 1.

46 hits on my last name + first initial, with 19 of the first 20 actually being my papers, when I search Web of Knowledge. Someone with exactly my initials (and, quite possibly, exactly my name) appears to work for Hughes aircraft, and has a number of patents on bonding technology. Someone with a different middle initial published like mad in the surface science literature between 1994 and 1998 before vanishing from the face of the search, and there was a doctor who seemed concerned with spinal cord injuries that's responsible for a number of papers in the 1980s.

Harvard/Smithsonian turns up 49 references for my (lastname initial initial), of which around 20 are mine.

Web of Science turns up 64 references for my (lastname initial initial), of which 16 are mine.

Expunging my doppelgangers from Web of Science reduces my h-index from the artificially inflated 27 to the more mundane number of 12, which is always a bit of a disappointment after seeing that big number.

I share a surname with a major publishing house. Unless you do advanced search, you won't find me at all, and even then you get more misses than hits :(

When I search my first initial and last name in PubMed and Google Scholar, I get no results (I have yet to publish anything myself.)

I'm lucky, when I Google my first name and last name, the only hits are me! Man, I'm unique.

A Pubmed search finds 75 papers for my last name and first initial, 23 of those are coauthored by me. It's 27/43 papers when I only look at the papers since 1993 (when I published my first paper). My cousin has the same last name and first initial and works in a distantly related field.

There's a Professor Jonathan Post (17th Century Poetry) and UCLA, and I'm a Prof. Jonathan Post with over 220 poems published. I've proposed that he and I publish a paper: "Doubles and Doppelgangers in Fantasy and Horror Poetry" by Jonathan Post and Jonathan Post.

My wife is not the only Dr. Christine Carmichael publishing science papers.

If I leave out my middle name or use just an initial for my first name, I can hardly pick out signal from noise even in Google Scholar.

Are we heading for the Swedish solution, where the government pays money to incentivize your changing to a unique name?

I have only one false positive on the Current Index to Statistics using my last name, and only one false positive on PubMed using my last name and first initial. Having a relatively unusual first initial helps -- my mother is J Lumley, and there are quite a few of them on PubMed.

I'm even on the first page of Google results for my surname (below the actress, the insurance company, and the horror writer), but that's largely due to having contributed to a successful open-source software project and its mailing list.

So long as we don't use the phrases which crop up in mass media, which make my hackles rise and my fingers clutch for a blue or red pencil: "More unique" -- or -- "Very unique."

I actually added an initial (my Mom's maiden name) specifically so I would be findable on Pubmed! It may be sort of an extreme solution, but there would otherwise have been no hope of dredging up my papers.