Surnames (family names) show distinctive geographical patterning and in many disciplines remain an underutilized source of information about population origins, migration and identity. This paper investigates the geographical structure of surnames, using a unique individual level database assembled from registers and telephone directories from 16 European countries. We develop a novel combinati...

The study of branching processes began in the 1840s with Irénée-Jules Bienaymé, a probabilist and statistician, and was advanced in the 1870s with the work of Reverend Henry William Watson, a clergyman and mathematician, and Francis Galton, a biometrician. In 1873, Galton sent a problem to the Educational Times regarding the survival of family names. When he did not receive a satisfactory answe...

© 2016 Mordak and Stewart. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate...

OBJECTIVES The study sought to investigate how Spanish names are handled by national and international databases and to identify mistakes that can undermine the usefulness of these databases for locating and retrieving works by Spanish authors. METHODS The authors sampled 172 articles published by authors from the University of Granada Medical School between 1987 and 1996 and analyzed the var...

In the original publication of the article, the given name and family name of the author P. Andrew Karplus was published incorrectly. The name should read as "P. Andrew" - Given name and "Karplus" - Family name.

Authorship problems are deep-rooted in the field of science communication. Some of these relate to lack of specific journal instructions. For decades, experts in journal editing and publishing have been exploring the authorship criteria and contributions deserving either co-authorship or acknowledgment. The issue of inconsistencies of listing and abbreviating author names has come to the fore l...

Most heritable surnames, like Y chromosomes, are passed from father to son. These unique cultural markers of coancestry might therefore have a genetic correlate in shared Y chromosome types among men sharing surnames, although the link could be affected by mutation, multiple foundation for names, nonpaternity, and genetic drift. Here, we demonstrate through an analysis of 1,678 Y-chromosomal ha...

Unfortunately, the original version of this article [1] contained an error. The corresponding author’s family name and given name were not included correctly and were inverted with given name being ‘Martin Sundström’ and family name being ‘Rehal’. The names are included correctly here, where ‘Martin’ is the given name and ‘Sundström Rehal’ is the family name. This will be corrected in the origi...

Scientific productivity is most often measured by the number and quality of published articles. Publishing solid, new, and interesting findings is critical for career advancement. Given the central role of publications in science, it is remarkable that we have tolerated the imprecision of using authors' names to locate their contributions. Few scientists are uniquely identified by their family ...

Until recently, it seemed unlikely that any semantic knowledge could be acquired following extensive bilateral damage to the medial temporal lobes (MTL). Although recent studies have demonstrated some semantic learning in amnesic patients, questions remain regarding the limits of this capacity and the extent to which it relies on those patients' residual MTL function. The present study examined...