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Is there any standard style for adding author information in research papers? I see different papers use different styles. Some have affiliation and contact address only. Some have affiliation, email, contact address in full. Some include designation also. So what is the best style one should follow? I am preparing a paper for a Springer Conference.

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    $\begingroup$ The conference probably has a website with all this information. If not, look for how papers in this conference in previous years, or in other Springer conferences, were formatted. $\endgroup$
    – Peter Shor
    Jun 28, 2011 at 2:27
  • $\begingroup$ I agree with Peter. Moreover, Springer provides you with a set of files which take care of the formatting properly. And if your paper is accepted, it will be edited again anyway to make sure it conforms to their format. $\endgroup$
    – Anthony Labarre
    Jun 28, 2011 at 6:02
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    $\begingroup$ @Anthony: Springer's templates and documentation do not really answer the question (and the conference web site usually just refers to Springer's documentation). For example, if you decide to include your email address, Springer's templates provide commands that you can use to format it properly. However, whether you include your email address is entirely up to you. $\endgroup$
    – Jukka Suomela
    Jun 28, 2011 at 9:28
  • $\begingroup$ @Kaveh: Sounds like a good idea. $\endgroup$
    – Jukka Suomela
    Nov 10, 2012 at 12:51
  • $\begingroup$ @Jukka, I just noticed that migration does not work for questions older than 60 days anymore. $\endgroup$
    – Kaveh
    Nov 10, 2012 at 16:15

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I think you should keep in mind how people are going to use this information and for what purpose.

  1. You use it to advertise yourself and your identity. You hope that little by little, people learn to recognise your name and know what kind of work you do.

  2. Other researchers will use the information to find more information about you and your work. If they find a relevant paper written by you, they might want to find your home page and see if you have done more recent research on the same topic. Or they might want to contact you and ask more about your work.

  3. Various organisations will use it to construct bibliography databases (DBLP, ACM Portal, MathSciNet, etc.) and to come up with all kinds of statistics (how many papers were published by university X). The editors of the bibliography databases typically want to figure out which papers are written by the same person (far from trivial, as the names are not unique).

Some advice based on the above use cases:

  • Please try to include your full name. Do not abbreviate your first name. Use the same version of your name in all research papers, and use the same version on your home page. For example, if you decide to use middle initials, do it consistently.

  • An email address might be a good idea (at least if you are not worried about spam email). Not that I would ever send email blindly to an address that I see in a paper, but googling for the email address might be much faster than googling for your name if you happen to have lots of namesakes.

  • Affiliations (the names of the universities, departments, institutes, and/or companies) are a must to keep your employers happy... They also help with disambiguation if you happen to have lots of namesakes. (Unfortunately people change universities often or have double-affiliations, and this will also create some confusion in the bibliography databases.)

I have no idea who would ever use your full postal address for anything nowadays – if they need it, they can google for up-to-date information. However, it might be nice to include the town and country, especially if your university does not happen to be named after (a well-known) city.

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    $\begingroup$ Good point about using your full name. Definitely use a middle initial and always stick to it. This will be important for all sorts of reasons, including when your university assesses you for promotion by doing all sorts of bean-counting, such as counting citation. $\endgroup$
    – Dave Clarke
    Jun 28, 2011 at 10:08
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    $\begingroup$ Instead of saying that you have to use your full name, I would say that decide what your name is in your first paper (including whether you want to use foreign accents, how to transcribe non-latin alphabets, married names etc.) and then stick to it for the rest of your career. $\endgroup$
    – Daniel Marx
    Jun 30, 2011 at 8:18
  • $\begingroup$ I agree with Daniel. Formatting your name the same way every time, and separating yourself from other people with similar names, are more important than providing your full legal passport name. If you want to use a shortened form of your name (Dan, say, instead of Daniel) or first initial and spelled-out middle name, or only the first part of a Spanish double surname, that's ok, but then you should use that form forever. Not using my middle initial hasn't caused me problems, but I have an unusually-spelled last name. If your name is common, middle initials are a good way to be different. $\endgroup$
    – David Eppstein
    Jan 24, 2019 at 2:14

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