The two surnames' nightmare on research
In Spain and most of Hispanic America we have two surnames, one from each parent. Mine are Jaspe and Villanueva, and only the first one gets used in daily life.
Research publishing was built around the Anglo convention: one surname, and it goes last. So when a paper by Alberto Jaspe Villanueva enters a database, the parser often takes Villanueva as the surname and Jaspe as a middle name, and files it under A. J. Villanueva. Other databases keep Jaspe Villanueva, others only Jaspe. Google Scholar, Semantic Scholar, Scopus, dblp… each one does its own thing, sometimes several things for the same person.
You end up with papers spread over two or three profiles, citations that don’t add up, and an h-index that depends on where you look. Not a big deal by itself, but we get evaluated with those numbers, for positions and for grants.
It is not a small group either. Two surnames are the norm in Spain and almost all of Spanish-speaking America (Argentina is the main exception), around 480 million people. Portugal and Brazil use two or more as well, mother’s first, so all together we are over 700 million, roughly one in eleven humans (Spanish naming customs and Portuguese names on Wikipedia).
I signed as Alberto Jaspe Villanueva for years, with the results above. Quite late I switched to Jaspe-Villanueva, with a hyphen, which is the usual advice because the parser then sees a single surname. It helps, but only partially: some indexers drop the hyphen, old papers keep their old form, and every year I spend a few hours merging profiles and fixing records.
Two things I would tell a student starting now:
- Decide how you will sign from the very first paper, and never change it. One surname is the easy option, especially if yours is rare. If you want both, use the hyphen from day one, and put that exact form in your ORCID.
- When you cite colleagues with two surnames, check how their names are written. BibTeX copied from a database propagates the wrong version, and every Villanueva, A. J. in a reference list is one more vote for the wrong name.