IEEE supports the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) initiative and guidelines on an inclusive approach to author name changes.
IEEE will allow authors to replace their prior name with their current name. Authors who submit a name change request will not be asked to disclose the reason for the request, nor will any legal proof or documentation of name change be required. They will be asked to provide an updated ORCID profile and an institutional email address. Requests for changes on behalf of another person will not be considered.
Upon request, IEEE will change the author’s name in their IEEE publications. This update will include:
No notice of the change will be posted with the article. Co-authors and editors of previously published articles will not be notified of name changes.
If desired, IEEE will work to update citations to the updated work that appear in other IEEE articles. Authors of citing articles will be notified of the changes.
In order to submit your request, please complete this form. Requests will be kept confidential, managed by trained customer service professionals and communicated on a need-to-know basis.
IEEE considers any fraudulent request to update the name of an author without their explicit consent to be a serious ethical violation.
The originally published version of record and documentation of the purpose of the correction will be kept and made available only upon request for a good cause (e.g., subpoena).
While IEEE will update its own published version of record to reflect the name change and send an update to indexing services, the change may not cascade to other databases outside of IEEE control. In addition, such services may have their own policies regarding author name changes. Please be aware that IEEE also does not control how other entities handle citations to papers in which an author name is changed (for instance, in bibliometric computations of h-indices). In addition, IEEE does not and cannot control the use or appearance of an author’s prior name in the material from other publishers, in print, or in non-IEEE archives or collections. Please also note that requests submitted via the author name change request form will only result in updates of names on published articles and will not modify conference websites and programs, where the original name associated with conference papers may be visible.
Authors who submit a request for a name change should be aware that changes in PDF (portable document format) versions of the articles may be visible due to changes in fonts, formatting, layout, etc. Changes cannot be accommodated in multimedia files (such as images or video) included with a published article.
Co-authors of articles for which an author requests a name change will not be directly informed by IEEE of the change. It is recommended that authors who request a name change inform their co-authors of the change in order to allow co-authors to correctly refer to the article with the updated author information in their citations, CVs, biosketches, webpages, etc. and to update any author-posted versions at personal websites/institutional repositories.
For questions about the IEEE name change policy, please contact authornamechange@ieee.org.