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Subject: Re: [docbook] On family/given/first/last names
Quoting Geraint North <geraint@transitive.com>: > If publishers do have strict guidelines in this regard, it would be > interesting to know _why_ they have these guidelines - I suspect that > they are artefacts from a time when search would be performed on the > printed document itself, which (as Markus showed in his example) has > clear disadvantages. I'm sure it is. The whole point of abbreviating first and/or middle names is to save ink and paper. I can't estimate whether you'll notice the saved bytes if you download a PDF version of a paper if your next-door-neighbor is just about to watch Hollywood's latest blockbuster via the net. I guess there is no measurable impact. So there is clearly no reason to abbreviate names in electronic publications beyond what the person herself would do, like many US folks who customarily abbreviate their middle name. However, a tie is essentially obsolete since the first t-shirt hit the market, but still there is no lack of colors, patterns, and shapes to choose from. The same holds true for citation and bibliography styles. Each journal has something like a corporate style to distinguish itself from the competition. Chances are that the journals don't want to give up their styles, however hard it is for the authors. The impact of the zoo of bibliography styles has previously been lamented in a letter to Nature[1] by Errol C. Friedberg (or should we say: Friedberg EC?) - without effect, as far as I can see. > Obviously an impossible proposal, but if _I_ were King of the > International Author Naming Committee, there seem to be only two things > of interest: > - How each author would like their name displayed > - An unordered set of all the components of their name (including > variants), for search purposes. > I see one problem here. It is not uncommon to see last names used as first names and vice versa. I recall a fellow student named "Ismeni Walter". Most of the time when attendance of some course was checked, the teacher would look for a guy named "Walter Ismeni" and was surprised to find a nice girl to answer (yes, her first name is Greek, the last name is German). This tends to make simple searches for unclassified name parts ambiguous. regards, Markus [1] Nature Vol. 437 p. 1232, 2005. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v437/n7063/pdf/4371232a.pdf -- Markus Hoenicka markus.hoenicka@cats.de (Spam-protected email: replace the quadrupeds with "mhoenicka") http://www.mhoenicka.de
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