Whether to include a middle initial in author name on academic publications?

Question

When a person is starting their academic career and submitting their first paper, they need to give some consideration to what their official academic name should be. Consistency across publications is an important principle. A common consideration is whether to include a middle initial in academic publications. Thus, I was interested in what general advice you would give to a PhD student or early career researcher deciding whether to include their middle initial in their author name on publications.

A few possible principles:

• Always include a middle initial because it reduces the chance that your name will be the same as another academic (including cases where only initials are shown in references), or because it looks more distinguished.
• Only include a middle initial if your name is common, because there is a simplicity in just having a first and last name that is desirable where possible.

So, in summary:

• What general advice would you give to PhD students and early career researchers about whether to include a middle initial in their publication author name?
• Would you give different advice depending on the name (e.g., John K. Smith compared to Ambrosia K. Hooperdinkel)?

Note that this is different to some related questions about (a) whether you can add a middle initial to previous publications (b) the importance of name consistency, (c) how to cite papers with inconsistent initials.

Answer 1

It's a matter of author's own preferences whether to include the middle initial or not. It's better to be consistent from the beginning, and do not use different styles in different papers, although the author might be able to "glue" together their records in some bibliographical services if they treat different spellings of their name as different persons (I have managed to do this on Scopus for myself, but there may be other databases which I don't know).

This, however, does not solve the main problem - it only reduces the chance that two authors will have the same name or initials, but it does not eliminate it completely. This is why authors are advised to establish ORCID:

Quoting http://orcid.org/, this is "a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognized".

Some publishers already allow the author to specify their ORCID during submission, and some others already require it, for example PLOS One and the Royal Society.

Another useful feature of ORCID is that it allows the author to keep a public profile with a list of their publications (and other optional details). Even more, one could link their ORCID profile to Impactstory (https://impactstory.org/) and track online impact of their research. As an example, by now I've already stopped maintaining a list of publications on my personal homepage since I can just put there links to several databases, ORCID being one of them, and most of them (as reported by Impactstory) are in open access anyway.