Anyone who has worked with old specimens in a research museum, as I have, knows the importance of being able to identify a collector because sometimes you might need to track down the person with questions about where they were collecting. Or, if they deposited field notes in the museum, which was a common practice, you can find info there. I don’t think any research museum allows pseudonyms to be used in their specimen records nor should they. But I do realize iNat is a different sort of archive with a diverse group of contributors.
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I do think it’s shortsighted to be too strict about using real names when the internet is involved. It’s far too late for me to try to obscure my online presence, but I won’t fault anyone else for wanting to minimize the ability to connect their activities on the internet with their IRL persona. Too many very real instances of someone’s safety being jeopardized. I’ve been both stalked and doxxed online before.
That said, I also do exist in scientific literature (barely) and want to leverage that for potential employment. Even though my participation in inat is largely from a hobbyist perspective, I do also mix up some professional uses. As such, I do describe my background in my profile, share my real name there, and also my orcid, for whatever those things are worth.
I do appreciate seeing people post about their backgrounds in their profiles, real names or no. I don’t care if you have a professional background or not, but if you describe your undying nonprofessional love for odonates in my corner of the world and you submit an ID for a damselfly I have no idea about, then I’m going to give your ID more weight than I would to someone who shares nothing about their inat interests in their profile.
It’s a shame that the UK is holding so firmly to such old practices. The world has largely moved past that rigidity.
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I would guess going forward that any scientists that don’t at least consider the value iNat observations will find themselves doing less than complete research, especially in the areas of ranges, seasonality, and even diet. In other words, this will work itself out. I’ve noticed a gradually increasing interest shown by professionals and haven’t heard a flat “you can’t identify those from photos” in quite a while.
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Regardless of what your user name is as it appears to others, you CAN put your real name in your profile along with any credentials you wish for people to know about you. This can be edited easily and at any time without messing with your observations. You DON’T want to change your user name as it causes all kinds of issues in transferring your observations (take it from me, when I first started somehow I ended up with two user names by accident and it was a conundrum getting my observations all correct and accounted for).
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Just for clarification, this is not an issue of changing a user name, but accidentally having multiple accounts.
Changing your user name is not ideal, as it is likely to cause confusion and links/@ mentions of your previous user name will be broken, but it should not affect your content beyond the change of attribution.
The name you use does say something about you and the stereotypes seem to hold. If there’s an incorrect maverick id blocking a correct id and it’s from “Peter Jones” there’s a good chance you can contact him and get it withdrawn. If it’s from “RetiringDaffodil” you’ll never hear back and he/she was probably only online for a couple of weeks.
Then there are the people who forget their passwords and rejoin under a similar name. I’ve even seen one such use the new name to confirm their own id’s under the previous name! (Every system can be gamed!)
its incredibly catchy too not gonna lie, I wish I had an idea for a cool name but I have enough of a reputation now that ppl know me by my real name 
too late to change now
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If you see a user “gaming the system” by using two accounts like this, please flag. Curators and staff can and will take action in cases of sockpuppets.
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I’ve seen this happen as well. I haven’t noticed any of them using the new account to game the system, but I never really checked. Based on the last active date on one account and the creation of the new one, it seems like they were legitimate cases of forgetting the old account.
Again, I then have to chose which username to use as “canonical”, and align the attributions for all the observations in our database to that username.
Of course, this kind of problem didn’t start with the advent of online citizen science platforms. In the olden days, observers didn’t always use the exact same spelling of their names in every context. In one context, their first names might be given, in another, it might just be one or more initials. When I took over management of this database, one of the first tasks I assigned myself was to harmonize the spelling of observer names. It wasn’t unusual to find 2 or 3 different spellings of a person’s name in the database. For one particular person, I think there was something like 5 or 6. Even after I finished harmonizing all the existing attributions, “twinning” would occur when an “old timer” would join iNat and start posting observations with an alternate spelling of their name (vs what they used back in the day). I’d then message the observer through iNat and ask if they are the same person who contributed such-and-such observations 30 years ago. In almost every case, I got a response along the lines of “Oh yeah, those were from when I worked as a park naturalist at Park such-and-such, I’m retired now…”. I’d then ask them which version of their “real” name they wanted to be canonical, and adjusted all their observations accordingly.
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I don’t see this stereotype holding, actually.
Just off the top of my head, I can think of a number of very valued specialist IDers in my area (central Europe) who have user names that have no resemblance to their real name (sometimes it’s a reference to their taxon of interest, sometimes it isn’t). Most of them give their real name in their profile; a few don’t.
There are also plenty of users who sign up with a name that is presumably based on their real name and then quickly lose interest.
I find that checking profiles is often the best way to gauge background and level of engagement.
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agree completely. if anything i feel ive even maybe noticed a slight correlation the opposite direction, which i think is maybe due to school projects sometimes encouraging/requiring students to use their real names when signing up. i have seen countless accounts named something like “alice_j” pop up, post three photos of a squirrel, then vanish into the aether…
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Tangential to the topic, out of mere curiosity: are there scientific journals routinely accepting of pseudonyms? (for authors I mean - not in acknowledging data contributors, whereby it seems accepted)
Example of concern: https://publicationethics.org/guidance/case/authors-used-pseudonyms-published-article
(On-topic: of the gripes I have, and hear around me, with iNat-derived datasets… pseudonymity never was an issue so far. On the platform itself, I find it nice having a traceable name and preferred language for interacting with users.)
Once upon a time this blogger fell for Google Authorship. Must have a clean headshot and your real name. Google abandoned that idea - but my name and face are now spread across the internet.
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| 2013 for Google Authorship my RL face and name | (apologies for this weird bit of text as I battle new laptop with Windows 11 - but screenshot success at least)
I invested a chunk of my time in Google Plus, where I was tricked into using my real name and face for the fleeting benefit of Authorship in Google searches. And, you know, a guineapig for Google Plus too.
January 2025 online discussion for a broader view
And the Conversation for a thoughtful take. Including this quote
The online comment management company Disqus, in a similar vein, found that comments made under conditions of durable pseudonymity were rated by other users as having the highest quality.
Based on a study of Huffington Post comments.
Of the 3 I read the Conversation - that is my preferred level, neither the rambling discussion, nor the academic research in exhaustive detail. Choose your poison.
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It should be and I believe is extremely rare to allow publication under a pseudonym in credible scientific journals. That’s all part of the search for open, clear, honest exchange of information and ideas in science.
In the case you cite, the journal reports that some of the authors wanted to be anonymous because they felt the couldn’t get a fair review if the reviewers knew who they were. That seems fair to me. However, the published article should have had their real names.
Obviously there are rare instances where publishing under real names would put the authors at serious risk. That should be taken seriously. Being honest about the pseudonym being a pseudonym should be considered, but interconnected as science is, it’s probably too easy to figure out who did the work.
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Fair question: since cats (dead and/or alive) are allowed to publish in physics journals, why not pseudonyms?
Cats aren’t allowed to publish in scientific journals. One did, with some human help.
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