citations - Names in my language used in publications are inconsistant. Should I worry about it?

In my language, name structure are different to Western names, and they have a lot of diacritics. To make it less confusing and easier to use for international work, we usually "transliterate" it to a non-diacritics version and reorder the position of components. The problem is, for different people, they will choose different way to change. For example, in my language, the name Nguyễn Ví Dụ will have these kinds of transliterate (I'm not going to list all "combinations"):

• Du Nguyen



• Nguyen VD


• NV Du


• Du NV


• or keep using Nguyễn Ví Dụ

Since the complexity of how a name is formed in the language is large, I can't really say which kind of "transliteration" is better than the others (it may even depend on the policy of the journals). And honestly, I don't think this is a problem to the authors if they decide to use a particular "transliteration". I know that I should keep those names as they are when citing the authors because that's how they get the credits.

Question: However, when I list some authors (say in my CV), one will easily notice the differences between how the names represented. If the reader doesn't really care about that, that's fine, but if they do, I don't know if they will have bad impression? For worse, three professors who wrote LORs for me referred my name in three different ways, same as how they write their names. And I myself have decided to just write my name as it is, which will make my application has four representations of my name. Should I worry about this?

Answer

Among those names you listed, the only place for concern about confusion is that the second representation (Nguyen VD) is not obviously the same as the the third and fourth (NV Du or Du NV). Now in your question you seem to have a couple of concerns.

1) You're worried about authors' names on your CV (I guess in your list of publications). Here the only likely concern should be for it to be clear which author you are. If you're in a field like math, where author order doesn't matter, you don't even need to list your name, just say "(with ...)" to list your coauthors. Otherwise, it's normal to list names as they appear on the paper. If you want, you can take some liberties by expanding to full names or adding diacritics as long as it is easy to identify the author list on the published paper with that on your CV. If for some reason it is still not clear which author you are (e.g., if other authors have some abbreviated name which might be yours), you can highlight your name on each paper (e.g., with an asterisk or use a different color).

2) For your LORs, it's common that different professors refer to people in different ways. Since these will be LORs for you, there should be no confusion of who they're referring to, as long as it's reasonably related to your name on your application. Also, if you list them as references, enter their names in their preferred format is reasonable, at least if you are writing in free form (e.g., you're not given certain spaces for family name versus given name). The committee will then see that the way you entered their names matches with the way they wrote their own names on their letters.