Professional scientists jokingly live by the mantra of ‘publish or perish,’ alluding to the entirely uncomical reality that publication record is often the most influential factor in hiring and promotion decisions. While writing peer-reviewed research articles comes with its fair share of challenges for any academic, scholars who change name must contend with additional complexities if they wish to align a career-long publication record under a single lived name. Transgender scientists have been one of the most affected and vocal groups about the importance of updating author names, although not all trans* people change name, and inclusive policies also benefit scholars who change name on account of marriage, divorce, religious conversion, or other personal reasons.
Admittedly, the publishing landscape has moved forward considerably in the last five years when it comes to accommodating authors’ name changes, pushed in large part by transgender scientists organising in collective efforts like the Name Change Policy Working Group (NCPWG). The NCPWG hosts resources for authors and publishers, including email templates for requesting name changes and a spreadsheet of name-change policies by publisher. The ‘Name change Guide for Trans* Academics’ by Dr Tristan McKenzie is another valuable guide. These and other resources provide an overview of the general processes involved in requesting authorship updates.
I was relieved to find resources from the NCPWG and others when I changed my own name, a process already fraught with apprehension, as I have written about for the International Society of Nonbinary Scientists (ISNBS). However, these materials still left me unprepared for the magnitude of bureaucracy and idiosyncrasies involved. Here, I share what I wished someone had told me before I embarked on updating my published name, including a detailed list of where to check for old names and steps to perpetuate a change across all versions of a publication, including preprints.
Auditing for author names
Many authors will be satisfied to change just the name that appears on the title page of an article. However, updating only the authorship line will often leave deadnames (prior names, which many people find distressing to reencounter) in many other parts of a work. Every editorial assistant I’ve worked with has missed some places a deadname has appeared. Therefore, I recommend concerned authors conduct their own audit for their old name and, in some cases, pronouns. Here are places to check:
- Authorship meta-data associated with the article, which is curated by CrossRef and other citation data managers and trawled by article search engines (e.g. Google Scholar).
- Email address for author correspondence*.
- Initials in the Acknowledgements, e.g. to note grant funds allocated to specific authors.
- Initials in an Authorship Contributions section.
- Links to archived code/data. For instance, links to project code might include a ‘FirstnameLastname’ username of GitHub accounts as part of the url.
- Page headers or footers.
- Self-citations, whether in the text, footnotes, or references section.
- Author bios, either in books or journals that have them.
- All of the above, but in the supplemental material instead of main text article.
- All of the above, but in a combined PDF of supplemental material and main text.
- For book contributions: table of contents, preface, bibliography, and/or introduction. E-books may be hosted at Google Books as well as a publisher’s site, which also requires a separate push from the publisher to update.
*If someone seeks to change name on a paper published while working at a prior institution, and an email address from the old institution was given as correspondence address, a hack may be necessary. For instance, if one’s correspondence email was john.doe@institute.edu, and that person now has a new name and appointment (say, jane.doe@university.ac.uk), it would be incongruous and even disingenuous either to list the new email for the past affiliation or to make up a substitute email address for the past institution. The simplest satisfactory solution I have found is to replace the email address with a personal, permanent (and real) email under the new name, e.g. jane.doe@gmail.com. Every publishing assistant or communications officer I have worked with has accepted this substitution.
For each of my articles, I compiled an inventory of the name changes required, listing page numbers and replacement wording if necessary. When I petitioned each publisher for a name change, I gave them the itemised list to implement. This inventory not only facilitates faster and more comprehensive changes but also serves as a checklist later to confirm the publishing team has correctly implemented all changes. For a watertight name change on an article, never accept assurances that the name is changed everywhere until personally verifying the result.
I recommend approaching the logistics of a name change with the same project management mindset and tools as used for collaborative research studies. For instance, I used my research journal to itemise the changes for each article, and spreadsheets to track dates of completed changes and details of outstanding issues. I scheduled follow-up steps into my work calendar over months to pace myself while still ensuring nothing slipped through the cracks.
If all of this effort sounds overwhelming and unnecessary, authors should remember there is no obligation or cutoff date to update authorship after a name change (social or legal), let alone update a name comprehensively throughout an article.
Chain-linked bureaucracy
The open access (OA) ecosystem is a growing movement to improve transparency and access to scientific research, for instance through sidestepping paywalls by uploading unformatted versions of articles to public archives either before (preprint) or after (postprint) acceptance for publication. While I wholeheartedly support OA aims, having archived versions of articles increases the complexity of name changes.
As of early 2024, the cascading dependencies to update my papers looked like this:
1a) Change name at the data repository (Zenodo), to generate an updated data citation.
1b) Change account name at GitHub to new ‘FirstnameLastname’, to generate a new file path to the article code.
2a) Change name with the publisher everywhere my name appeared, with updated citations to data and code.
2b) Change name on preprint(s), e.g. at arXiv, bioRxiv, or EarthArXiv.
3a) Change name on the unformatted, accepted version of the paper (authors’ accepted manuscript, AAM), including data and code references.
3b) Change name with my institution’s library archive, updating the AAM copy.
3c) Change name with ResearchGate, updating the AAM public copy and/or formatted non-OA private copy. Email coauthors to request they remove outdated public copies they previously uploaded (because only the person who uploads a copy has permissions to remove it).
Most steps are contingent upon completion of the previous one. For three of my papers, I found additional mistakes after the original name change and had to repeat multiple steps to perpetuate the change across all article versions.
Inclusive policy principles
Most editorial staff I’ve asked to change my name have been responsive and willing. Of eight publishing platforms I contacted, seven made an invisible authorship change. The last journal responded to my notice of name change to say, ‘We are sorry to hear this,’ as though self-determination were a tragedy and not a delight. They offered to publish an erratum, which I refused because I have worked with coauthors funded by governments infamous for human rights violations. I worry about my colleagues’ safety if changes to our article were to notify institutions afresh of their former association with me. Safety concerns are one reason the NCPWG name-change guiding principles for the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) include that changes be invisible, implemented without notifying coauthors or readers. The four other principles are (1) accessibility; (2) comprehensiveness; (3) expedience and simplicity; and (4) recurrence and maintenance.
To editors and research colleagues who wish to be better allies: a good starting point is to update journal policies in line with the NCPWG guiding principles and the Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Science and Health (EDIS) group checklist for publishers. While name-change policies impact relatively few people, they are instrumental in ensuring everyone can contribute freely—and be credited accordingly—in geography and other disciplines.
To researchers contemplating a professional name change: darling reader, you deserve autonomy over how people refer to you. No matter how novel the spelling of your name, no matter how neo your pronouns, no matter how many times you change these things—you are not asking for too much. You deserve to pursue science without fragmenting yourself to fit the static confines of outdated protocols. I hope this guide, alongside ongoing improvements to publisher practices, makes that a little easier.
About the author: Dr G. T. Antell is an Assistant Professor of Physical Geography at UCLA.
Suggested further reading
Boyer, K. & Wood, I. (2024) Spaces of change: Everyday gender activism through near-peer gender and sexuality workshops with young people in the UK. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12616
Stansfeld, K. (2024) ‘Are we invisible?’ Power-geometries of conviviality in a superdiverse London neighbourhood. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12688
Todd, J.D. (2024) Exploring young trans people’s everyday experiences of ‘out-of-placeness’ and socio-bodily dysphoria. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12662
How to cite
Antell, G. T. (2024, November) Changing author name and pronouns in academic publications: a user guide. Geography Directions. https://doi.org/10.55203/TKWK1208
Geography Directions 