I guess the basis of my argument is that the only solution that would
ensure that the i18n requirements were effectively dealt with
would be
to ask the person how _they_ want their name displayed and searched
for. This would mean that the journals wouldn't get their
consistency,
but as an author or reader, it would seem more important to me that a
particular person was consistent _across_ different publications,
rather than the list of authors be consistent _within_ a single
publication.
Another thing: one purpose of writing names like "Last, First
M." (besides being different from competing journals by all means)
is to allow easy browsing of a reference listing sorted by author
names. If you just tell the publisher how you would like to read
your name e.g. on a book cover, this is clearly not enough to get
useful reference listings. You'll have to add hints as to how your
name should be sorted (remember the odd cases like "Van Zandt,
Steven" in the "V" section vs. "van Beethoven, Ludwig" in the "B"
section). Even if you provide the sorting hint, the listing is
still hardly usable if it lists names as provided, e.g. it is hard
to find the start of the "N" as in "North" section if the line
starts with "Geraint". So I'm afraid there has to be some concept
like last name to allow useful reference lists sorted by author names.
I thought this, and then I thought "Why would I ever want to do such
a thing?". I read a fair few research papers, and I don't think I've
ever thought "I wonder who is referenced in this document whose name
begins with 'M'?" Sorting does make search easier if you've got the
paper printed out and so have to search manually yourself, but in
that case, an effective sort should be driven by the expectations of
the reader, rather than the preferences of the cited individual - if
the readers of the paper are predominantly western, then the
arrangement should reflect their expectations, however incorrect they
might be.
So in your example, I (as a reader) would want consistency between
van Beethoven and Van Zandt - I don't care how they like their name
printed, I just want to be able to find the "Van someone" that I
vaguely remember in the list. Indeed, if we were treating the
references list like an Index (another structure optimised for human-
search), each name would appear twice.
Wandering off the point slightly, this was the reason that we decided
to remove the Index from our documentation - it wasn't properly
marked up with primary terms, See Alsos and so on - it gave the
reader nothing that they couldn't do by hitting the search box in
their PDF reader/web browser.
Thanks,
Geraint North
Principal Engineer
Transitive
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