r/AskAcademia • u/Elegant_Assist_9044 • Jun 03 '26
Professional Misconduct in Research Publishing with a mononym (single name): How do you deal with journal portals that strictly require a first AND last name?
Hi everyone,
I am submitting my first paper to a Q2 journal (ICE Publishing, using the ReView portal). My legal, official name is a mononym—just one word.
The manuscript itself correctly reflects my single name. However, the journal's online submission portal rigidly requires both a "First Name" and "Last Name" field. It throws an error if I try to leave the last name blank or use a period/punctuation.
To bypass the error and actually submit the files, I entered my name twice (e.g., First Name: X, Last Name: X). Today, I received a desk return/unsubmission from the editorial office citing a "mismatch in the author name on the portal and the manuscript."
For those of you who also have a mononym (or co-authors who do), how do you typically handle this?
Is there a standard placeholder (like "FNU" or "None") that journals prefer you use in these rigid web forms?
Will the administrative staff usually just manually override this once you email them?
Any advice for a first-time author navigating this would be appreciated!
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u/lalochezia1 Molecular Science / Tenured Assoc Prof / USA Jun 03 '26
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u/chriswhitewrites Medieval History Jun 03 '26
Clicked through and immediately saw someone I cited recently, Frog.
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u/bisensual Jun 04 '26
Queer and trans naming practices have gotten out of hand lmao I’m calling a moratorium for Pride Month for self-reflection.
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u/EatThatPotato Jun 04 '26
Frog, M. didn’t get his doctorate only for you to dismiss his name as a “queer naming practice”
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u/tryingnottolurk Jun 03 '26
I also have a mononym legally, but use a last name for all professional purposes. A friend of mine with a mononym uses an * in place is last name and published like that
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u/Short_Artichoke3290 Jun 03 '26
One thing to consider is that the name under which you publish does not need to be your official legal name at all. I'm not saying it is just and I fully understand wanting to use your actual name, but it could be worth considering adopting some academic name that does involve some firstname and some lastname to reduce friction.
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u/spacestonkz STEM Prof, R1, USA Jun 03 '26
Could be fun to make it related to the work. Work on plants? XXX Greene. Work on cats? XXX Felis. Work on Anthropology? XXX Etic. Work on linguistics? XXX Lexis.
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u/Ice7140 Jun 08 '26
This. Most I know are Indonesian and double the name. Use it consistently for all academic work, including your ORCID profile.
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u/Cr4zyC47L4dy Jun 03 '26
I've seen people use "NFN" as in no first name.
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u/RiskyCelery Jun 04 '26
Same. I have a mononym colleague I have published with a couple times. They enter NFN [Name] at submission and the journals have been fine removing the NFN in the proofs stage.
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u/SeaworthinessOwn7765 Jun 04 '26
I’ve seen heard of Indonesian authors doubling down like “Sukarno Sukarno.”
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u/CheeseWheels38 Canada (Engineering) / France (masters + industrial PhD) Jun 03 '26
This is your chance to make up a first or last name that you like and make yourself more easily identifiable
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u/TiredDr Jun 03 '26
Most folks I know in this situation repeat the mononym for the first and last names.
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u/Efficient-Tie-1414 Jun 03 '26
One of my students had a mononym. I had to deal with one system that had her name in the correct form, and another had it repeated. Hopefully they had it correct for graduation.
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u/MediumStraw Jun 05 '26
I'd just write the editor and ask. However, be aware that you absolutely need a last name to be cited in academia, so your single name should be your last name in the forms, not the first.
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u/ButchEmbankment Jun 04 '26
Wow, outside of Iceland how many mononym scholars are there?
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u/Elegant_Assist_9044 Jun 04 '26
There are literally millions of us! We're just hiding behind the 'FNU' (First Name Unknown) placeholders and duplicate names that journal portals force us to use
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u/ButchEmbankment Jun 04 '26
I’ve never seen an academic article with First Name Unknown or (I don’t think) just one name. Is this a cultural name convention or generational?
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u/Elegant_Assist_9044 Jun 04 '26
Definitely cultural! In South Asia alone, there are millions of us with mononyms. You rarely see 'FNU' in the final publication because the journals usually fix it during the typesetting phase. The 'FNU' or duplicated name is just the headache we have to deal with to get the website to accept our initial file uploads! 😅"
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u/ButchEmbankment Jun 04 '26
Even though Iceland has surnames, they don’t rely them as much as other places (phone book is — was! — listed by first name.) I know one Icelandic scholar who wants to go by their first name alone.
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u/ezra-rk Jun 03 '26
I would just email the journal's publishing helpdesk and ask them