We are very honored that the work “Making a Name for Myself: On Academic Naming Policies and their Impact“, which was co-authored with multiple Queer in AI scholars, has received a Best Paper Honorable Mention at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FaccT 2026)
In summary, the paper is about why names matter, how academic naming practices impact researchers, why name change policies are important, how people benefit from it and what there still is to do. In practice, we took a mixed-methods approach and i) surveyed and interviewed people who changed their names, ii) performed a large-scale quantitative analysis of different kinds of citations errors across ML venues (NeurIPS, ICLR, ICML, AAAI, ACL, NAACL, EMNLP, FAccT) over the past 6 years. For the former, only 11.1% achieved complete removal of their deadname, and many publishers took prolonged periods of time to report name changes. For the latter, we find that naming errors in citations have several reasons (ranging from mere typos, to compound name errors, transliterations, wrong person attribution, citing the wrong person, and ignoring name changes), but that venues with active policies surrounding name change and correction feature overall fewer errors. As our name is often our brand in academia, this should be a reminder that there is still a lot to improve and why community driven advocacy remains essential.
For more information, read the full paper. The abstract is provided below:
In academic publishing, names connect scholars to their work. When scholars change their names, including for marriage, academic recognition, or gender transition, they may lose credit for past publications. However, despite significant impacts on citation accuracy and researcher well-being, no existing studies examine how naming policies in computer science serve researchers who change their names. We use a mixed-methods approach combining surveys (N = 36), interviews (N = 11), and large-scale citation analysis of papers from eight major computer science venues from 2019–2025. We document the multi-year advocacy effort that established the first name change policies, identify implementation barriers including incomplete publisher updates and months-long processing delays. Researchers continue being cited with misparsed and incorrect names despite publisher updates. When these citation errors happen, interviewees report significant mental health impacts, including stress, anxiety, and safety risks. Empirically, we find that venues with accessible and visible name change policies have significantly fewer citation errors compared to inaccessible policies (899 vs. 996 errors per 1,000 papers; p < 0.001). Our annotation analysis shows that deadnaming of transgender researchers in citations decreased by 92% from 2019 to 2024. Our findings demonstrate the importance of inclusive publishing policies, for which name change policy advocacy led by trans researchers has been a significant driver. We recommend that venues adopt proactive visible name change policies, support queer advocacy groups, and improve publication infrastructure to build an inclusive publishing landscape.