This is an archive copy of the IUCr web site dating from 2008. For current content please visit https://www.iucr.org.
[IUCr Home Page] [CIF Home Page] [mmCIF Home Page]

Re: names, confusing

Lynn Ten Eyck (teneyckl@SDSC.EDU)
Tue, 30 Jan 96 14:20:04 -0800 

Herb Bernstein writes . . .

>I regret to prolong a discussion that should simply be closed by
>a clean decision of some sort, but just for the sake of clarity on
>the issue of names in databases, consider the case of John Smith
>with a son named John Smith Jr.  We wish to enter cites for both
>in a useful way in a database.

Precisely . . . but useful for what?  In this case we are primarily
concerned with consistent identification.

>                               Now, if everone is just an individual,
>there is no need to be concerned with family names per se at all.
>However, if we will be searching the data to see which relatives
>are publishing, then we should give related people related names,
>and, in honor of the very concept of family, we might wish to give
>members of the same family the same family name.

This is a fundamental problem which we probably cannot solve in a
culturally neutral way.  Some cultures don't HAVE family names; others
have systems of nomenclature which show geneology by CHANGING the name
with *every* generation.

>                                                 This should
>encourage us to say that the family name in both cases is Smith,
>rather than contending that one party has a family name of Smith
>and the other has a family name of Smith Jr.   Indeed, in most
>families, John Jr may well be called John Jr as if his forename
>were John Jr, arguing for the construction Smith, John Jr. which
>leaves the son nicely related to Smith, John and avoids
>misconstructions when the father is called Smith, John Senior.
>
>Worse, some people follow the practice of dropping Jr when Senior
>passes away.  They do not think that their family name has changed,
>and in searching cites, we may wish to link them to their past, which
>suggests pushing Jr, Senior, I, II, III, etc as far from the family
>name as possible and even dropping it for search preliminary search
>purposes.

Of course, even in our culture approximately 50% of the population
changes their name legally if not professionally on marriage or
divorce, and I have known some who were sufficiently upset with the
circumstances leading to divorce that they were willing to drop the
connection to previous professional work in order to get rid of as many
associations with the name as possible . . .

The bottom line is that names have a large voluntary component which
breaks ALL familial rules.  The definitive form is that chosen by the
author on publication, and we need a simple way of capturing that
information for purposes of cross-referencing database information.  We
can add a great deal of complexity to attempt to cover most of the
cases without achieving any more than this.  I vote to keep it simple.

>Now, since the question of titles was raised, I do hope that, if a
>CIF does allow titles with names it will do so in some way which
>allows the titles to be clearly distinguished from names.  Better
>to eschew titles entirely than to add to the confusion.  Generational
>suffixes are difficult enough to disambiguate from names.  Titles
>are even harder.

Tell people how the items they put on the paper will be parsed, and let
*them* worry about whether the addition of a title is worth possible
confusion and loss of credit for related (pre-title) work.

>Consistency is an attribute of good databases.  It is difficult to
>be consistent with names, but, precisely because the questions raised
>are difficult, it may be worth a bit more thought.

And now does anybody feel like tackling taxonomy . . . with official
commissions, whole journals devoted to changes and revisions, and
genomes of source organisms undergoing major transgenic alterations?

Come to think of it, perhaps the definitive deposition includes the DNA
of the authors as well as the DNA of the source . . .

I now corrupt the democratic process by voting *again* to keep it
simple.

Lynn Ten Eyck