Why the taboo against naming discoveries after yourself?

Question

It is often considered a very bad idea to try to name a discovery (a law, phenomenon or an invention) after yourself.

On the other hand, there are many species names which seem to be a bastardized Latin of the discoverer's name. With gene names, I'm not sure, but I've seen many frivolous gene names, such as those inspired by cartoon characters. I wonder if you could get away with naming a gene after yourself if you wanted to.

In other cases, such as names of synthetic strains and plasmids, it is in fact preferable to use the researcher's name. Off the top of my head, I recall GFAJ-1 - the surrounding controversy aside, given all the work she's done, what is so wrong about her wanting to name it after herself?

However, why is this so? Apparently, it can even advance to an extreme where many years after a discovery has become established and associated with Dr. Jones, when he writes a review article on applications of the Jones Effect he will still carefully avoid acknowledging this name.

Isn't it convenient to simply name something after yourself when no clever acronym exists? Isn't doing the work of the discovery enough to earn the right to name a thing? Doesn't the fact that the discovery is important enough to be published automatically imply that it's important enough to be named after oneself?

Answer 1

In general, the name of a thing should indicate an aspect of it which is very important to the person assigning the name. A person who creates something and names it after themselves implies that they think the most important thing about it is that they created it. That would in turn suggest to anyone who isn't interested in the person who created it would likely not be interested in the thing thus named.

Thus, naming something after oneself is not necessarily a sign of ego, but rather the opposite. If Alex Johnson (made-up name) publishes a paper entitled "Alex Johnson's Laws of Quarkions", the title would suggest that the paper was primarily relevant in relation to Alex Johnson's other work and would have little relevance outside that. If instead the paper had been simply published "Laws of Quarkions", that would have a stronger implication that the author believed laws described therein to be universal, and thus relevant everywhere.

It is only after the importance of something becomes self-evident that the attaching of the creator's name to it really serves to elevate the status of the creator. Until such time, the attachment of the creator's name will tend to deprecate the importance of the thing thus named.

Answer 2

Traditionally naming after scientists has been considered an honour bestowed upon somebody by their colleagues. This is why there are plenty of such names in latin animal or plant names. one very good example is Strigiphilus garylarsoni, a chewing louse, named after Gary Larson, author of the Far Side.

Naming can also be subject to strict laws. In some countries, it is, for example, not possible to name official places after persons until after they have passed away. This is to prevent people to inflate their own reputation while alive (it is quite easy to see where such behaviour is going overboard). But, this is a digression.

The main point is that etiquette indicates that one does not name things after one-self, one can hope that the work is so appreciated by others that a naming occurs. It is probably also a good thing that everything we discover is not named after a person. I drove my Smith at 120 kiloJones per Dickens.

Answer 3

One reason is that academia tends to frown on self promotion of all sorts (not just naming things after yourself). This is certainly not a universal rule, and some areas are more tolerant of self promotion than others, but it's a good first approximation.

Another reason is avoiding conflicts of interest. A meaningful, descriptive name is better than naming something after its discoverer (imagine if black holes were called something like "Smith objects"). Furthermore, several people are often involved in any given discovery, either as coauthors or as authors of related papers, and it can be tricky to decide who really deserves the most credit. If you let people name things after themselves, they will naturally have a bias to choose that name instead of a more meaningful or appropriate name. Ruling this out of course doesn't eliminate all bias, but it's a start.

Answer 4

The one word answer is: culture. The culture of academia — and indeed many other areas of life — has a variety of rules placed on self-promotion and naming. These are, in many way, arbitrary, capricious, and often illogical or unreasonable, but that's just how culture is. It serves various functions, some good and some bad.

The general rule is: complimenting someone is an honor, while complimenting yourself is usually frowned upon. The cultural mores are that you should be concerned with other people's opinion of you and work hard to win their high regards, but you should be humble and uncertain of your own personal values.

This is partly due to a myriad of psychological mechanisms, like the fundamental negative bias (people are naturally better at spotting and remembering negative things), attribution bias, illusory superiority (everyone thinks they are above average), tactics to combat free-loaders/loafers/cons, and vested/conflicted interest.

In short: we are highly skeptical of people who are trying to tell us how great they are. Also, naming things is hard, at the same time as having something named after you is considered an extremely high honor — a truly grand compliment.

If I said, "Man, that Brian guy is really an amazingly great person" or if I discovered a previously unknown kind of rock and named them "Brian rocks", there are many people who would immediately have the urge to punch me in the face.

It is further generally recommended that you avoid doing things that make people instinctively want to punch you in the face. And so it goes in academia. You are free to ignore it and name a tower after yourself or try to place your own name on a discovery, but you should just be warned that some people might not react well to this.

Ultimately, it's just a weird social truth: it's always better to have people compliment you than to have to do it yourself. That's not to say you can't toot your own horn (especially when no one else seems to want to), but it's way better to get yourself a shill.

Man, that Superbest guy asks great questions...

Note: Not all cultures are this way. Indeed, in business it is generally accepted that you can name the business or product after yourself all you want, and self-promotion is often actively encouraged with far less limitations. This is, one might imagine, an area where business and academia don't always see eye to eye.

Answer 5

My sense of this is that a name on a scientific artifact is seen as a form of immortality. Newton's Laws will remain Newton's Laws for untold centuries to come, and Isaac Newton will be remembered as an important figure of science for discovering them, just as Carl Friedrich Gauss will be remembered, and Leonhard Euler, and Edsger Dijkstra, and Marie Curie, and so on. Even when the students who use their names don't know their biography, they honor their memory.

If you name something after yourself, you are saying that your accomplishment is as significant and deserving of going down in history as the ones that I have named above. Most scientific work, however, doesn't turn out that way. Even the work that does is mostly identified only by how it stands the test of time. So if you name something after yourself, you are effectively saying that you are so smart that you can see into the future and tell that history will judge your work as super-important.

What a massively egotistical assumption!

Note: Some things, like synthetic plasmids, are exempt from this principle because they are not so much immortalizations as card catalog indices. You are not likely, for example, to find "Janet Wang's plasmid," but rather "pJanetWang-73j-v2" meaning something like Janet Wang's 73rd plasmid, type j, version 2.