This is exactly why I am having problems at my new job. I did not hyphenate my name. Added my husbands without hyphenating for legal purposes. Go by just the maiden one for professional. Now the large bureaucracy that employs me is having a tough time giving me an email that does not include my husband's last name. Months it is taking, months!!!! Just heard this week there may be light at the end of this tunnel, and I may soon have a proper email at my new job and won't need to use the one from my old one (that my old advisor there helpfully made practically indestructable-- very handy, that).
Wow, good to know. Thanks for the story.
Re. JuliaKB above: my coworker also did not hyphenate her name, instead choosing to use BOTH her maiden and married names in subsequent publications. Big problem for pub med searches, as pubmed only puts in her married name. I think Pubmed should publish a last name how-to!
I think we should get pubmed to fix this. Afterall, it's their problem really. How stupid.
What if you seach with lastname* (where * is a wild card character commonly used to signify anything else after this is also a match...) That often works for imprecise database searches...
My husband and I dated for a few years before graduate school. The deal was, if we got married before my first publication I would take his name-after that I was keeping my own.
During my postdoc he called me and said I just read a great paper by J.E. Jones, she worked where you work. Me...Jane, she is great. Him...Wait...you know Jane, how come I've never met her.
Smack, you have, we had dinner with her last week. She married John Smith.
Oh.
Jenn, PubMed doesn't have wildcard searching. This is a big part of the problem! And it is totally their problem.
Julia, sigh, typical.
Thanks for letting us know! I had never noticed this problem. I sent them an email.
That is precisely the reason that I never changed my name after getting married. I prefer that my family call me by my "un"legal name (first name + husband's last name), but for all other purposes my name has not changed one bit.
I don't like discussing my marital status or explaining myself to other professional colleagues that I might not know so well, so not changing my name is a lazy way to avoid it all together.
Btw, in undergrad I was told by the job counselor that engaged and married women should not wear their rings to job interviews. Perhaps this is a carryover?
In a recent issue of Nature were a long disussion about asian names (how many papers signed by Li for example?). Several agencies are working on associating each author with a number, like DOI. That would solve problems for asian people and people who change their name. But it will probably take a couple more years...
This is not an advertisement for Scopus in any way, but it does have this really great feature that I think all of these databases should have: you are assigned an author number! So if you change or hyphenate your name, you can ask (by a quick email) them to group your articles by author name and then any one of your monikers should pull up all of your articles.
JP, I didn't wear my engagement ring to my graduate school interviews. I was afraid it would alter their perception or me (a very young Southern woman getting married...kinda fills a stereotype). Plus, like you, I just don't want to talk about it with people I don't know. That wasn't the point of my visit.
No one told me to do that, though, and I don't know if it made any difference (obviously).
Blop, I did read that article, but it's going to take them forever (possibly stretching into never) to redo all the back files too.
LM, thanks; I didn't know that. In fact, I've never used Scopus. Funny thing but we always use Pubmed.
Oh my goodness. I keep forgetting we're not really in the 21st century.
I still have people ask me which name of my hyphenated last name to file me under. It's tiresome, but I can deal with that, because if they're honestly confused, I'd rather they asked than assumed.
But it really, really really irritates me when people shorten it for me because it's "too long" -- and by picking the second (and presumably married) name. When ppl shorten hyphenated first names like Jo-Anne or Mary-Ann, they don't usually shorten it to Anne or Ann -- they usually shorten it to Jo or Mary. So why would you shorten Smith-Jones to Jones rather than to Smith, unless you're subconsciously assuming it's a married name and the partner's name is somehow more "real"?
Ah, yes, sexism is still alive and well.
My hyphenation is not actually related to marriage... So when people are sometimes shocked upon discovering that my spouse's last name is neither of mine, I sometimes feel it serves them right. 
I'll stop ranting now.
The PubMed search engine sucks rocks. I've gotten so used to Google's fuzzy search that it's both inefficient and annoying to have to be so precise with my search terms. I really like the idea of author identifiers, since that would solve a number of name problems that I've run into: name changes, variant spellings (e.g., Van Buren vs. VanBuren), journals that misspell the author's name and multiple authors who have the same common family name and initial(s).
Out of curiosity. How does google scholar handle the name? I generally find google scholar lously for full literature searches, but for things like finding jane doe who is now jane doe-smith, I suspect it would excel.
Good question! I just tried GSch. on this particular case and it is completely ineffective.
Aha! This is why I got married BEFORE my first publication came out. (I mean, it's not the only reason. I also wanted to plan the wedding before joining my thesis lab.)
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