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Abstract
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Chinese authors are publishing more and more papers, but are they receiving due credit and recognition for their work? Not if their names get confused along the way. Jane Qiu reports.
Jia Wei, associate dean at the pharmacy school of Shanghai Jiao Tong University can remember hundreds of metabolic pathways by heart, but he gets confused by his graduate students' publications. Three of his students -- Wang Xiao-yan, Wang Xiao-rong and Wang Xiao-xue (pictured above with Jia) have completely different two-character given names in Chinese, but all publish under the abbreviated name X. Wang. "I really have a hard time sorting out who has published what," Jia sighs.
A similar confusion could arise if John Roberts and Jane Roberts worked in the same lab and both published as J. Roberts. But name recognition in China is compounded by the challenges of transliterating Chinese characters for English-language publications, and by overuse of a few common surnames by the growing population. Estimates by China's Ministry of Public Security suggest that more than 1.1 billion people -- around 85% of China's population -- share just 129 surnames. Problems with abbreviations, ordering of given names and surnames and inconsistent journal practices heighten the confusion...
When publishing in English-language journals, Chinese researchers adopt a phonetic version of their names, converted through the pinyin romanization system, which uses the Latin alphabet to represent sounds from Chinese. This approach, however, is not bidirectionally unique. There are two Chinese surnames that can be 'spelt' as Wang, for instance. And the problem is compounded by the sheer number of Chinese researchers who have not just the same surname, but also the same initial. Searching the biomedical-literature database PubMed, curated by the US National Library of Medicine, for articles published by 'Wang X' results in 8,904 entries, and this number rises almost daily.
This issue is not unique to the Chinese. "Japanese and Korean names have the same problem when published in English," says Masao Ito, president of the Human Frontier Science Program based in Strasbourg, France, which promotes international research in the life sciences. Not surprisingly, researchers and editors using search engines and publication databases find it difficult to identify Asian authors. "As a result, Asian researchers are less likely to be invited to participate in collaborative projects or to become reviewers," says Ito.
Publishers make things worse by having varying rules for Asian names. For example, journals differ in how they abbreviate polysyllabic Asian names. If journals abbreviated all the Chinese characters of a given name (Xiao-rong becoming X. R. and Xiao-xue becoming X. X., rather than shortening them to just X.), Jia says that it would help to distinguish between researchers' publications. "This is very problematic when we appraise researchers' performance or during head-hunting," he says.
Similarly, some journals insist on listing given names first and surname second, whereas others allow authors to present their names according to the tradition in their own countries. Take, for instance, two researchers previously working on nanocarbon technology at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Yang Wei and Wei Yang (see 'Character confusion'). According to Yang Wei, now at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, not only did several researchers at Tsinghua have exactly the same name as his, but he shares the same initial with several other Yang's working on nanocarbons elsewhere. "You would be lucky to be able to locate the researcher you are looking for," he says.
The problem is sufficiently widespread that some researchers have taken advantage of the ambiguity. Surgeon Liu Hui, who padded his CV with publications by another researcher who shared his surname and initial, rose to become an assistant dean at the prestigious Tsinghua University. But the discrepancies were noticed and he was dismissed by the university in March 2006.
And if Asians can't distinguish between researchers from their own country, it's much more challenging for Westerners, says Gene Sprouse, editor-in-chief of the research journals for the American Physical Society. "When I asked my editors why we have so few Asian reviewers, they said that it's because so many Asian researchers have the same surname and initial that they have difficulties in pinpointing the appropriate ones," Sprouse says. And the problem will only get worse as Asian authors publish more papers, he adds.
Publications from China, Japan and South Korea have increased rapidly in recent years, and by 2006 made up one-fifth of the scientific literature indexed by Thomson Scientific's Science Citation Index (SCI) -- roughly two-thirds of the amount from the United States (L. Leydesdorff and C. Wagner Scientometrics; in the press). Publications by authors in mainland China indexed by the SCI are growing particularly fast, from 2.3% in 1996 to 8.4% in 2006.
More than words
To address this trend, the American Physical Society has taken the unusual step of offering its authors the option to list their names in Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters, in addition to the transliterated English version. "This is not just a publishing issue," says Sprouse. "A person's name is important. Our initiative is a statement that we respect our Asian colleagues and welcome their submissions to our journals." The society may extend the offer to other languages, such as Arabic...
Language: en |