Standardization of the signature
Properly indicating the workplace enhances the visibility of centers and institutions within the international scientific community, as well as the reliability of bibliometric indicators on productivity, impact, ranking, etc., for countries, institutions, regions, and provinces. For this reason, the following recommendations are proposed:
- Authors must always include their institutional affiliation and do so in Spanish: “Universidad de La Laguna”.
- The following must be included, in this order: the name of the group (if applicable), or department (if applicable), center or institute (full name and acronym, if any), institution it depends on (full name and acronym, if any), postal address, city, and country.
- It is strongly recommended to include the name of the center or institute in its original language, which is linguistically correct. Including the center's name translated into English is a common practice to enhance its international visibility. However, to avoid the proliferation of variants and non-standardized names, it is recommended to do so only if the center has a standardized name previously accepted by the institution and always accompanied by the corresponding acronym in the original language to ensure proper identification.
- In the case of mixed centers/units dependent on several institutions, it is advisable to specify the name of the center and the institutions on which it depends.
- In the case of research staff from the hospital sector who are also university professors, it is recommended to include both institutions.
Examples:
Department of Applied Economics, Faculty of Economics and Business, University of La Laguna (ULL). Guajara Campus. 38071 La Laguna (Tenerife), Spain.
University Institute of Bio-Organic Chemistry “Antonio González” (IUBO). University of La Laguna (ULL). Avenida Astrofísico Francisco Sánchez, 2. 38206 La Laguna (Tenerife), Spain.
Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC), Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), University of La Laguna (ULL), Milky Way Street, s/n, 38205 – La Laguna (Tenerife). Spain
University Hospital of the Canary Islands (HUC), University of La Laguna (ULL), Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Spain
Recommendations approved by Agreement of the Governing Council of the ULL of December 22, 2015. Adapted from the document: Proposed manual to assist Spanish researchers in standardizing the names of authors and institutions in scientific publications. Version 17/01/07. Document prepared for FECYT by the EC3 research groups of the University of Granada and Quantitative Analysis of Science and Technology of CINDOCCSIC.
IraLis (International Registry for Authors Links to Identify Scientists), It is a system for standardizing the signatures of scientific authors that aims to create an authority registry. It attempts to:
- Raising awareness among authors of the importance of always signing in the same way, considering how they will be referenced by international databases, OAI archives and search robots, which are under the influence of English culture and habits.
- Draft standardized signature criteria to be indexed correctly and to distinguish oneself from other authors with the same names.
- Produce a database with all the signature variants used by each author. The record includes those that the author may have used, as well as those interpreted by the producing entity, aggregator, etc., from the various information sources.
- Perform automatic bibliographic searches using signature variants.