Hello and thanks in advance for your response. I’m Brazilian and I have two surnames. In Portuguese-speaking countries, when a writer has two surnames, we should index his or her work starting by the last surname. When we cite Lygia Fagundes Telles, for instance, we cite her as Telles, Lygia Fagundes. Not all people who live outside Portuguese-speaking countries are aware of this rule. Can this cause a problem for tracking citations? If a journal asks their readers to cite Lygia Fagundes Telles as Telles, Lygia Fagundes and people incorrectly cite her as Fagundes Telles, Lygia, will the citation be missed? In case it will, can an editor ask Crossref to register a writer’s article both ways (as Telles, Lygia Fagundes and as Fagundes Telles, Lygia)?
Hi!
Thank you for taking the time to post and provide some insight into correct citation of names from Portuguese-speaking countries.
We come across this frequently and assist authors in getting the metadata corrected with the publishers when they request it.
In regards to citation matching in the Crossref metadata:
If the publisher has included a DOI for the cited article, (either by itself or as part of a formatted reference) then the DOI is used to match. This happens as soon as the metadata is successfully deposited.
On the other hand, if its a formatted reference and does not have a DOI, then our matching system extracts and matches other features, such as the title, journal, and author, to confirm the match. This process takes longer if it doesn’t find a match at first. This is why including the DOI is so important for citation counting.
For your question about how the order affects the citation matching, you can try it with our Simple Text Query form. I tried this with another authors who have two last names in their article metadata deposited with Crossref. The order of the names did not seem to matter, even if I reduced it down to their initials.
This depends of course on the metadata for the article being deposited in Crossref and the quality of the metadata. Articles with minimal metadata may have a more difficult time matching.
So, to answer your question: the order of the name in the citation does not seem to matter with regards to our citation matching.
For the single instance of the name for each author deposited in the metadata by the publisher, it does not seem to effect the citation matching systems’ ability to find a DOI. (All DOI metadata is provided to us by our publisher members. Crossref does not update, edit, or correct publisher-provided metadata directly.)
Hope this is helpful!
-Poppy
Thanks for your response, Poppy! I used the Simple Text Query and indeed it seems to track citations even if an author is miscited. However, I still think that Crossref may lose citations when the order of an author’s surnames is incorrectly cited. So please let me know in case a journal can ask Crossref to register a writer’s article both ways (as Telles, Lygia Fagundes and as Fagundes Telles, Lygia).