Citation complications
I'm Robyn Speer. If you see a citation of a different R. Speer related to ConceptNet, that other name is my "deadname" -- that is, a former name that I don't use for any purposes and don't want to propagate, because it doesn't fit my gender identity.
See Citing ConceptNet for my recommendation on what citation to use for ConceptNet.
This excellent blog post by Jonah Coman is a great overview of the context of citing trans academics.
For me to continue in research as a trans woman, I need to be able to choose my name and keep my publication history. I've amended many of my recent papers to have my name on them. No matter whether you're seeing the amended version, or even if you're citing a paper I haven't been able to formally change, please always cite me as Robyn Speer. Never cite the other name. If the citation doesn't match the paper you're seeing, it's because the citation is right and the paper is wrong.
I know that I can't change every paper that's ever cited me and every piece of paper my old name was printed on, and I'm not trying to do that. There will always be some erroneous references to me out there. I am, however, working to ensure that all new references to me (starting in 2019) use my correct name.
If I've pointed you to this page, it may be because I've seen your new paper and it cites me by the wrong name. In this situation, I want you to understand: I'm not angry at you just for having old information, and I'm deeply sorry for the inconvenience. I truly appreciate that you cited me, and I understand that lots of wrong information about my name is still out there, such as in other people's references. But that's going to remain the case if you continue propagating my old name.
I understand that it's unintentional. I need you to fix it, and I hope this page will give you some information about how to do this in various situations.
This is very easy to fix. arXiV lets you correct a paper, no questions asked. Just change your references and upload a new version.
This is still a fine time to catch the mistake and fix it, especially because it's not indexed by Google Scholar yet.
Contact the editor you submitted your paper to, and let them know about the situation. Include your corrected camera-ready copy to help them out. You can link them to this page.
If the publication you're submitting to is published by ACM, mention that you'd like to correct your citation so that it satisfies the ACM Policy on Author Name Changes. My name is a case of "Updated Identity" and your work is a "citing work" under that policy.
That's okay, nobody reads print proceedings. I would like you to contact the editor with an amended version that can go into the electronic proceedings.
Publications in the ACM Digital Library can be amended under the ACM Policy on Author Name Changes. If your editor doesn't make the change happen, try making a request to publication-policies@hq.acm.org and citing that policy.
Many NLP conferences are published in the ACL Anthology, which has a process for submitting revisions to papers -- new versions of papers that stand alone and don't change the scientific content. You can use the revision process to correct my name, as some authors including myself already have. They will make the corrected version be the canonical version that the DOI resolves to.
I'm working on finding a similar process with other publishers, such as AAAI Press (which has sometimes agreed to one-off changes).
Well, that sucks. That's what the one recent publication I can't change is like, also. I wish that I or your editor had noticed sooner.
If this is a book chapter, you probably have a version that you send to people informally, and you can correct that version, at least.
If this is a book that will be updated with new editions, please make sure my correct name gets into the next edition.
Situation: I've let my editor know about the change and they say it should be published as a separate "corrigendum" or "erratum"
This isn't sufficient. This is an inadvertent consequence of some overly-cautious policies, and it doesn't help at all in allowing researchers to be trans. Name changes are not corrections to the scientific content of the paper.
ACL and ACM originally tried to address the issue using their existing errata process, but thankfully there were advocates within their teams who identified what a non-solution this was and kept pressing for a real solution. You should, too.
IEEE's policies do not support name changes. The only way we can proceed is clear: we have to get IEEE to change its policies.
This means I need you on my side in a battle in which we're outmatched. I'll need you to pressure your editor and everyone we can reach up the chain of command to make the change. I'll need you to call them out when they refuse. Remember that it's not your fault alone: your editor's responsibility in this process was to catch the error before publishing it in a place where it's supposedly immutable.
If this whole process sounds exhausting to you, I agree. A lesson to learn for the future is: never publish with IEEE.
If it's not IEEE, then probably the best thing to do would be for you to put your editor in contact with me. I recognize that you at least tried. Some editors have come around after talking to me directly.
Situation: The bibliographic style guide says to cite women who change their names with "née [previous name]" in the citation
Don't do this for me. That would be harmful, and it's not necessary. This isn't the situation that style guide was written for.
Imagine if "negative citations" were a thing. Imagine if someone could cite you in a way that harms your work, making you less visible and less included in the research community. You'd avoid research communities that use negative citations, right? But when you cite a trans person by their deadname, it really does have the effect of a negative citation.
Your name is what people call you, and changing it was an important step in finding my identity, as it is for many trans people. If you call me by my old name, you're spreading misinformation about me that would attempt to turn me back into a person I'm not.
To change my name academically, it's not even enough for me to let people know my name has changed -- I also need to convince thoroughly unaccountable systems like Google Scholar. At the moment, Scholar is spreading my deadname and (as an unfortunate consequence of some heuristic) hiding citations of me under my new name, even if you search for the exact string "Robyn Speer". There is nobody at Google who intends to fix this. The only thing I can do is to try to change the algorithm's belief, by giving it lots of evidence over a long period of time that it has indexed me incorrectly.
But in the end, this isn't just about Google Scholar. No matter what kind of system it's going into, misinformation about my name harms me. It undoes my progress, and worse.
Transphobes use deadnaming as a weapon -- a personalized slur for each person they hate, with plausible deniability built in -- and I'm sure you're not one of those, but you wouldn't want to give them cover and comfort. Not even accidentally. Deadnaming is wrong, and if you believe an academic or bureaucratic process requires you to deadname someone, the process is wrong.
I came out in an academic context around October 2018, and since then I've done what I can to make the information about my new name available. This date has no relevance to citations, however. All citations of me, no matter when I wrote the paper, should use the name Robyn Speer.
I'm glad that you've read this page, and I hope together we can make academic publishing a more welcoming place for trans authors.
Starting points
Reproducibility
Details