Author Name Change After Publication

ASM Author Center / Ethics Resources and Policies

ASM Journals supports authors who have changed their name for personal reasons, including but not limited to marriage or divorce, religious conversion, and gender identity change and would like past ASM publications to reflect this change. Authors should contact the journal to request updates to their published record. ASM Journals staff will treat such requests confidentially and work with authors to ensure changes are made quickly and accurately.

Evidence of a legal name change is not necessary. We do not require any identification, however, authors must attest that they are requesting the change on behalf of themselves; requesting a name change on behalf of someone else is considered a serious ethical violation and would be brought to the ASM Ethics Committee.

Authors may update any instance of their prior name, pronoun, or salutation in their ASM Journals publication(s). A formal correction is not required and other authors on the paper need not be informed of the change. Changes can be made in the author byline, email address, or any other site within the body of their paper.

Unfortunately, due to the complexity and interconnectivity of the citation network across publishers, we cannot update citations for papers in which a name change has been made.

ASM Journals will update the PDF and HTML versions of the paper on our website and work with indexers to facilitate changes on sites such as PubMed and Web of Science. We cannot control whether or when author name changes are made to non-ASM sites.

If an author wishes their work to be fully discoverable in all indexing and archiving sites under both prior and current names, then the name change would need to be issued via a formal correction. Because corrections are published under the full byline of the original paper, they require notification of all authors. The correction would state that a name change had been made, but would not specify the change.

It is an author’s choice whether they want to issue a formal correction. We recommend an ORCID iD to authors who change their name and want to ensure that all of their prior publications are discoverable in one place.

In addition to correcting past publications, our staff will work with authors to ensure that name changes are reflected in all ASM Journals systems, as needed.