A recurring problem in academic science is trying to correctly identify a single author. For example, I was reviewing a grant that made reference to a group, but not a specific paper, and needed to sift through a few pages of search results in order to determine which of the people with that surname was the one I was looking for.
I’m somewhat fortunate in that the combination of my last name and first initial is not common. The Harvard/ Smithsonian Astrophysics Data System turns up all of my papers and nothing else when searching for “Orzel, C.” The INSPEC database comes up with one bogus result, a patent for a cardboard holder for sales objects. (I remember some other search tool coming up with a handful of papers in medical journals, but I don’t seem to have access to that any more.)
Other people are not so lucky, and need to include middle initials or the like. And for some names, that doesn’t even help. I remember a post-doc when I was a grad student saying that he had once done a journal club presentation on papers by people named “R. J. Thompson” who weren’t him. There are quite a few.
So here’s a poll topic to pass the time while I deal with class and a sick baby:
How many spurious results do you get if you search your favorite publication database for authors having your last name and first initial? How does this compare to the total number of your own publications?
As always, leave your answer in the comments. If you comment under a psuedonym, you don’t need to say what your name is, just the number of results.