In citations, how to find out if it's a compound name?

I have a paper that I want to cite in my own work, in the form "J. Wayne" (for John Wayne) in the bibliography part of the paper and Wayne in the body of the paper.

The full name of the author appears on the paper as Aaaa Bbbb Cccc, and is typically a non-western name. Say, consider something like John Fitzgerald Kennedy, but let's assume you never heard of them, and they obviously are from a different culture, and you don't know if their last-name is Kennedy or Fitzgerald Kennedy.

Should I note it in my Bibtex file as Kennedy, John Fitzgerald or Fitzgerald Kennedy, John ? This will change things when printed with last-name only, it will appear either as Kennedy or Fitzgerald Kennedy.

So, more generally, is there an academic naming convention for this kind of situation ? Edit: To be more precise, what I want to know is if there is a standardized way for an author with such a name to sign his paper, for example Aaaa Bbbb-Cccc, so no ambiguity is left for the reader. Or for the reader, if one has a guaranteed way to know this (seems not).

I must add that I have seen the considered author cited as Bbbb or as Cccc, one of these being obviously incorrect (even both could be).

Answer

No.

(aeismail has already addressed nicely how to deal with this, but what follows is too long for a comment.)

As far as I know, there's no standard way (i.e., the same for every name no matter the culture) of indicating which components of a name are considered to be the last name. In fact, even the concept of last name is different from culture to culture and may even be absent -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Names_by_culture. Even in Europe, you can get quite complicated naming systems. So you are really trying to identify the "main professional name", whatever that may map to in a given culture. To identify it from the list of names as written within that culture, you have be familiar with the specific naming conventions (maybe the Wikipedia page helps, or if you know someone from that culture, you can ask them).

It's worth keeping in mind that getting it right serves two purposes:

1. 
   

   Making sure everybody knows the person you refer to, even if they don't know the full name.

   
   


2. 
   
   

   Showing courtesy towards that person.

   
   

While the second point is the only one of importance when addressing the person directly ("Dear Professor/Dr. X"), in your case the first point is actually more important: If (say) a referee wants to check the bibliography whether you cited a relevant author's works, they would expect to find them in a certain form. If everybody uses the same (wrong) way of parsing the name, it would arguably be the right thing to do to follow that choice.

(Finally, you could also chicken out and just list all authors in full, native name order; in Bibtex, you can do this by wrapping the full name in curly braces.)