Is it acceptable to cite people without putting the appropriate diacritics in their names?

Question

I've begun preparing my thesis and several key papers in my field are written by people with foreign accents in their names. While I have found a way to include this in my thesis with BibTeX. However it has come to my attention that many citations exported from online journals (as .rif, .enl, or .bib) or my previous EndNote library may not include accents in non-English names.

While I would like to attribute these appropriately it is clearly a laborious task to check for the sheer number of references included in a thesis unless strictly necessary. Therefore I have two related questions:

1. Is it acceptable academic conduct to cite authors without correct accents when citing them in an English language thesis (or publication)?

2. Is it common practice for reference managers or online export tools to support accents or author names (i.e., can I take it for granted that my existing library has included these characters correctly or will be necessary to check references previously imported by online databases)?

To clarify, this query concerns accents such as those found in names originating in French, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, German, Scandinavian and Te Reo Māori languages. Such as the symbols:

ó, ò, ő, õ, ø, ö, and ō

Answer 1

As somebody with accents in the name who does not put them on scientific papers, I would recommend going with the way they put their names on the papers.

Certain people are very particular about having the right accents, but others (including myself) consider them a nuisance and avoid them. The only way to know in the particular case is to check the paper and stick with the format on the original paper.

As far as ethics goes, I have never heard of any such policy, but there are certain people who will be your eternal enemy if you write their name incorrectly (i.e. without the right accents).

Answer 2

I'm not sure how far ethics comes into this, but omitting accents is, effectively, a misspelling of the name. If you need to cite something by Schön, and you instead write "Schon", I'd regard that as analogous to writing "Schöm" or "Schöh": pretty close, but certainly a typo. If I'm reviewing a paper, I will request correction of missing accents as I would for other misspellings, but I wouldn't regard it as an ethical breach.

In practice, there's a bit more leeway for missing accents than for other misspellings, partly due to former limitations in computer typesetting, and partly due the dominance of English as a scientific language and the frequent belief among native English speakers that accents are always optional. As Burak Ulgut says, some authors won't mind missing accents, while others will care a lot -- but since you can't know which is the case for any particular author, you should keep the accents. In some cases, missing an accent may have unfortunate consequences in the author's native language: if you cite a Swedish Dr Hörberg as "Horberg", you've just turned them into "whore mountain".

For citation purposes, the correct spelling is (almost always) the one on the publication itself: if, say, Miloš Blažek chooses to publish as Milos Blazek then that's how you cite him, no matter what it says on his birth certificate.

On the technical side: unfortunately you cannot take it for granted that exported bibliographic records will handle non-ASCII characters correctly, or for that matter that they will handle anything correctly. Bibliography record formats are a mess of partially supported, poorly defined standards interconverted by buggy code, and you should always eyeball the record after importing it to catch any errors (not only accents).

As you say, it's clearly a laborious task, but so are many aspects of writing a thesis :).

Answer 3

This isn't a matter of ethics: it's a matter of respect. It is disrespectful to spell somebody's name incorrectly. It is doubly disrespectful to knowingly spell somebody's name incorrectly because you're too damned lazy to do it right.

Answer 4

I fully agree and can give extra input into @BurakUlgut's answer (+1), and @Ponts answer about the names in the paper itself. I want to reinforce the advice that you should use the names as the author's themselves put on the papers. This will prevent confusion in some cases.

In the country where I was born my name contains an accent (actually a non-latin1 letter, which is a variation of the letter l), and it is written that way on my birth certificate. Yet, since I moved out of my country of birth when I was a child and in the following two countries that I lived and worked as an adult I never used the accent because my parents omitted it from my entrance documents. On the single paper I have published to this date my name figures without the accent.

Now, had you gone through the trouble of checking my nationality and checking how my name is properly written in my country of origin you would make a mistake in the citation. Moreover since the name that would be written in the citation would not be possible to link to my name in almost any of my documents.

Yes, this is a strange corner case. But, I believe, that it illustrates well why the names on the paper itself are a good choice for citations; i.e. assumptions you make about someone's name may be quite wrong.

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_{99% of my documents say Michal, I was born Michał, and people often make mistakes like Michael. (And I tell everyone to call me Mike to make things simple)}

Answer 5

The purpose of a reference is primarily to allow others to follow along with your thought process and independently consult the materials you used to support your statements. As such they need to be accurate enough to allow your readers to find the original papers.

The second purpose is to be able to "traverse the tree of knowledge" by finding all other papers that cited a particular one. This means automated tools must be able to recognize the citation. Most tools strip accents - precisely because of this problem.

Everything else is courtesy - if people get offended because of a missing diacritical mark, that is unfortunate; but it is hardly a breach of ethics.

EDIT: Note that when I answered the question, it asked whether it was "ethical" not to get all the diacritical marks. The question was since edited to ask if it was "bad". It is clear that some people will take umbrage when you misspell their name; unfortunately, the same authors' names are not always spelled the same way in different papers, which frankly increases the level of confusion when you try to do it right (if you referenced Erdős here and Erdös there... is that the same person? People with average eyesight might not even be able to tell the difference. Neither might average proof editors. Only one of these spelling refers to a famous mathematician. But if you Google "Erdos" you will find him, either way.)

Answer 6

Generally it is standard practice to use as much of the original accent marks as the format allows. (For instance a 7-bit ANSI or 7-Bit ASCII Email is very limited in what characters it can display.)

It deemed respectful to use the added effort to use special computer tools to support the proper accent marks. Most word processors have these built in, but if not your OS should have a character select tool with "related characters" to find the various accented versions of a particular letter.

Additionally, you should check if there is a localized version of the research material for your region, some authors like to use localized versions of their pen-names, and in this case it would be rude to use the wrong pen-name, and citing a localized version of a resource can provide a lot of ease to the audience of your work when they are doing further research.