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Citing yourself, QMUL and your funder

Citations showcase your work to the world. It’s important to cite yourself, your institution and your funder correctly to avoid misidentification, identify yourself to potential collaborators, enable your research output to be attributed to your institution and ensure your funder is properly acknowledged on the research outputs they have contributed to.

Your name as an author is key to establishing a unique public profile for the dissemination and promotion of your research. Authors are highly recommended to use the same variation of their name consistently throughout their academic and research careers. A consistent name enhances the discoverability of your research and a unique name helps to establish a presence for you.

To find out if other authors have similar names do an author search in several databases such as PubMed, Scopus or Web of Science and answer these questions:

  • How many name variants are there for your name?
  • How many authors share your name?
  • How many authors with a similar name have publications in the same subject area?
  • Is it possible to distinguish publications from authors with similar names?

If you find similarities in author names, consider adding your full middle name or using your middle initial to distinguish it from other authors.

There are several resources to help authors manage unique and consistent author names to ensure that their publications are associated with the correct author.

  • For anyone conducting and publishing research, an ORCID is a valuable tool because it allows you to directly and uniquely identify yourself and your research. In addition, publishers, funders and other organizations are increasingly using ORCID in their manuscript submission and grant application procedures.
  • Web of Science enables you to set up a free unique Researcher ID, selecting your publications and confirming your institutional affiliations.
  • If you have authored articles on arXiv you may create an author identifier.
  • The Scopus Author Identifier assigns each author in Scopus a unique number and groups together all of the documents written by that author. Scopus Author ID is system-generated, but you can request author detail corrections.

Acknowledging Queen Mary correctly in the affiliation address you supply to publishers will ensure the visibility of the corpus of outputs produced by Queen Mary researchers; we use this as a way to isolate the work of Queen Mary authors from others in a particular field and support the analysis of citation and other metrics at an institutional level.

The institutional name must be cited as:

Queen Mary University of London (without commas, or abbreviations)

This title must be used as the institutional address on all forms of research outputs and grant applications, irrespective of where the affiliation appears and should be recorded as near to the beginning of the affiliation as possible. Some examples of acceptable citation formats are:

Researcher name, Queen Mary University of London

Researcher name, Barts Cancer Institute, Queen Mary University of London

Researcher name, School of Physics and Astronomy, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS

Researcher name, Blizard Institute, Barts & The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, Queen Mary University of London, Turner Street, London E1 2AD

For more detailed advice see the College's citation policy.

Acknowledging the funding you have received is very important and funders require it. The Research Information Network is a body set up by a consortium of UK sponsors (four HE funding bodies, three national libraries and seven research councils) and they have produced a guide on Acknowledgement of Funders in Scholarly Journal Articles including the following recommendation for standard text:

This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust [grant numbers xxxx, yyyy]; and the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number aaaa].

When acknowledging your funding please ensure:

  • The funder's name is written out in full.
  • Work funded by multiple funders - each funder should be separated by a semi-colon, with 'and' before the final funder.
  • A statement about how the underlying data can be accessed (where applicable) is included.

Data requires citations for the same reasons as other types of publications: to acknowledge the original author/producer and to help other researchers find it. DataCite provide more information about citing your data.

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