Hacker News Reader

Comment by generationP | Hacker News Reader

OK, so I typically use DOIs in my bibliographies, although I seem to be in the minority for now. What next? You have to find the exact name of the author that changed and edit it. Let's say you do so (not a trivial undertaking since references do not come in a standardized format even if the DOIs do; by the way, arXiv doesn't understand bibtex). Now my paper says "Merton and Fox observed in [5] that...", and you know that Fox (one of the authors of the [5]) became Wolf. Will you change my text to "Merton and Wolf observed in [5] that..."? How can you tell that this particular "Fox" is a surname rather than the animal? What about acknowledgments, which come with no DOI or ORCID?

View on HN

You make a good point that one should use the newish \orcidlink facility whenever one first bothers to type out the name of an author.

It doesn't seem quite as critical when the name is only part of the citation, so long as the ORCiD is in author list at the other side of the DOI.

But I think you misunderstand me regarding who should do the work: the original author is in charge of ensuring their ORCiD is included in the author list and that its entry is kept updated.

If you are just citing a work, just give the doi and whatever authorlist you found at the time.

Then I'd say that if you want to refer to a specific author of a work, you need to lookup their ORCiD and use whatever they specify as their preferred name. Also include the ORCiD itself so that the next researcher to come along knows where to find the up to date name.

This is more trouble than it's worth for the mathematicians of today. What exactly is gained from these ORCIDs? A DOI auto-generates a clickable link, allows for automatic reference tracking, and (hardly an intended feature but perhaps the best one) helps readers find a copy in places like sci-hub and LibGen (on sci-hub, DOI is the only lookup option that currently works). With an ORCID, I could make it double-clear that the D. E. Knuth I'm citing is the real Donald Ervin Knuth. Nice, but I'm supposed to learn a new command and spend 10 minutes researching authors per paper for that?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com