For professors/lecturers, grad students/postgrads, and anyone else with an interest in academia as a profession.
The identity consequences of a long-term research partnership
Up until about six or seven years ago, most of my research was co-authored with a scholar at another university. She and I are also friends, so we are often together when we go to conferences (though this has been less often true in the last decade or so). The result of this is that a lot of the rest of the field--at least people who don't know us well--seems to think we're interchangeable. We've even had the experience, multiple times, of someone talking to one of us for hours and subsequently remembering incorrectly that she had instead talked to the other, or someone remembering that we were both present for a particular event or conversation when only one of us was. This has always been pretty baffling to me--my colleague is European while I am North American (so we have extremely different accents in English), we don't look anything alike, and personality-wise we are really quite different as well. And yet.
Well, I found out recently that the top journal in our field actually has our email addresses indelibly linked in their system. This means that whenever the editors of that journal email one of us for any reason (for example if they're inviting to review a paper), the other one automatically is emailed too. We've now asked them more than once to correct the problem, but they haven't managed it yet. It's very strange and throughly frustrating.
It's probably just as well that we've each struck out more on our own in the last few years! I am not my co-researcher, dammit.



