Two different abbreviations of your name in literature

Question

I have been publishing in the past with a certain abbreviation of my name which I am unsatisfied due to draconian rules in my previous institution which wrote my name in the following way: X. Y. Z. lastname2.

Being my name composed of the following nouns: firstname1 firstname2 lastname1 lastname2.

For new publications I wish to change it to another format such as X. Y. lastname1 lastname2.

I wonder about the impact it might have in my academic profile, this is, whether articles databases would fail to index correctly both of the publications to the same person.

I also wonder what other complications this change of my name abbreviations might carry.

Answer 1

One of the implications that will happen is that it will be slightly more tricky to cite your works:

• general confusion when citing an author with the inconsistent spelling of the name
• this and this talk about initials usage
• inline citations of multiple works may become weird
• reference manager systems might be confused, and organizing a library would be more complicated (it is already complicated with all other caveats)

However, I have to say that the problem of the different spelling of the name in cited works happens quite often, so I would incline to say that the author being happy with the way their name is spelled is much more important.

Answer 2

Orcid is a modern tool for disambiguating researcher identities.

You could also have a public Google scholar profile, Arxiv profile if appropriate, and profiles at any academic social networking sites widely used in your discipline and make sure they all list all of your articles, and no others. (Having falsely listed articles reduces the trustworthiness of the listings; many Google scholar profiles have random entries with no citations at the end, for example, due to people with similar names having written a bachelor's thesis at a professional higher education facility.)

Given these solutions, it should not be a huge deal to change the way your name is written. People do also change their names and survive the process, so you should be fine.