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What problems could arise, legally and professionally, if the author's contact information and institution are incorrect on a published scientific article?

For example, suppose the review process starts while the author is at institution A. Then the author moves to institution B, and the review process finishes long after, and the author simply forgets to update the information.

Do journals care? Do institutions care? Please note that I am not asking about funding acknowledgements.

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  • No, nobody really cares. A footnote with your new address is nice, but people can find you.
    – Jon Custer
    Commented Oct 1, 2021 at 21:08
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    The institution that supported you while you did the research would like to be mentioned... If you want to hear from readers, it is good to show a working address.
    – GEdgar
    Commented Oct 1, 2021 at 21:13
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    @GEdgar, that is probably the basis of an answer. Same for Jon Custer.
    – Buffy
    Commented Oct 1, 2021 at 21:42

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Nobody really cares. If you want to insure yourself against any unlikely claim that the paper was published by some other person who happens the same name, my suggestion would be to make sure you have an ORCID id and associate that with your name -- which is something you should be doing anyway.

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    Well, the bean counters in the administration care. I believe the main reason why you sometimes find two affiliations for an author is that both (the old and the new) departments want to count this paper in their institution's internal statistics.
    – user9482
    Commented Oct 4, 2021 at 6:36
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    @Roland: I am curious: how do the bean counters spend their day? Scanning the publication list of every department member, including PhD students, looking at every Arxiv submission for proper attribution of the institute? Again, I am not asking about grant attribution.
    – Ambicion
    Commented Oct 4, 2021 at 18:05
  • The reality is that the bean counters do not care about an individual paper.
    – Wolfgang Bangerth
    Commented Oct 4, 2021 at 18:47
  • @Ambicion My department submits all our publications to an internal database that is maintained by our library (and freely accessible in our intranet). This database is used to produce publication benchmarks for the annual evaluation of the departments.
    – user9482
    Commented Oct 5, 2021 at 6:47

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