Credit: AlamyAnomalous experience academic erroneously linked to tarot book warns others to check their online identities

Academics should regularly ¡°garden¡± their online identities to ensure that they are not being incorrectly credited with work that could damage their scholarly reputation.

That is the view of Melissa Terras, co-director of University College London¡¯s Centre for Digital Humanities, who was surprised to discover when she logged on to her Google Scholar profile that she had apparently authored a range of papers and book chapters on tarot and projective hypothesis.

This did not sit easily with Dr Terras, who describes herself on her self-titled blog as a ¡°committed atheist¡± who ¡°doesn¡¯t care for the occult¡±.

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¡°Probably the first thing you do when you are going to work with someone else, or you want to know more about their work, is to google them,¡± Dr Terras told Times Higher Education.

¡°If conference organisers are looking for a guest speaker, they will do the same. I was uncomfortable being associated with that field, but if people (had) a quick look at me online, that¡¯s what they¡¯d find.¡±

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After ruling out the possibility of a namesake having written the erroneously attributed articles, Dr Terras ascertained that the error had originally occurred in the publisher Springer¡¯s online database, which carried information about a book it distributed online titled Re-Symbolization of the Self.

But she said that it took six days of ¡°constant emailing¡± and the threat of legal action before the records were changed.

Dr Terras has published an apology from Springer on her own blog, which says that the ¡°very rare¡± error was due to an ¡°operator¡± at a data supplier mistakenly using ¡°an already filled-out sample template for updating the chapter metadata¡±. ¡°It shows how little we know about the back-end of how online systems work,¡± she said.

Unfortunately, because websites cross-reference each other so frequently, Dr Terras remains associated with tarot on a number of websites.

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¡°It was really interesting to see how that original error came back - it locks you into the system as being the author of a certain thing, and takes away your control over your academic identity. I am going to have to go to inaccurate websites manually and issue cease-and-desist orders to each of them,¡± she said.

Neil Jacobs, programme director for digital infrastructure at the higher education technology consortium Jisc, urged academics to check their online attributions on a regular basis and to sign up for an Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (Orcid). The system, launched last month, assigns a unique code to each researcher, making it easier for electronic databases to identify authors accurately.

¡°The success of Orcid will depend on take-up but it is embedded in the typical workflows for researchers so we are hopeful it will take off,¡± Dr Jacobs said. ¡°For example, when researchers submit an article for review they will be asked to register for Orcid, and once registered it will automatically be there the next time.¡±

Dr Terras added: ¡°People should make sure they are checking out their online identity at least a couple of times a year, looking for ¡®weeds¡¯. Most of my colleagues actively garden their online digital identity.¡±

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chris.parr@tsleducation.com.