The Google Scholar bug that erases researchers from their own work

Imagine working your entire life to become a PhD microbiology researcher, one of the absolute best in the world in your domain. You have been the leading researcher on a groundbreaking whitepaper that will influence thousands and you've published your findings to Google Scholar - there's only one problem.

Your surname only has one letter, and Google Scholar omits you from citations from your own works because of it. You will never get the credit you deserve because Google has decided that they do not care about you, and you will never know why.

That is, until now.

Google Scholar has a bug that omits researchers with single letter surnames from their own works, meaning that when someone clicks the "Cite" button for a research paper, they are left off of the list completely.

I reported this issue to Google's Abuse VRP on January 21, 2026. The case was closed roughly twelve hours later with a boilerplate "not a security vulnerability" reply pointing me to an outdated Google Scholar general help page - which funny enough was also broken.

The broken Google Scholar help page Google directed me to — Seriously, does this look like it's going to fix anything?

After multiple follow-ups asking for reconsideration or a referral to the right internal team, I realized I was ghosted and the report was never re-opened. So here's the report, in public this time.

The bug

Google Scholar's name parser treats single-letter surnames as noise. When a researcher has a one-letter surname - common in Chinese and Korean cultures - two things happen:

Their name displays incorrectly on their own profile — reversed, treated as an initial, or formatted inconsistently.
They are omitted from citation exports — click "Cite" on their paper, copy the result, and their name isn't there.

The underlying database links still work. Their profiles still exist and citation counts accumulate. But the user-facing "Cite" button, Google Scholar's primary citation export feature, produces incomplete citations that omit these researchers entirely. Anyone who copies that citation for their own works is now spreading an inaccurate author list.

Researchers with multi-letter surnames don't experience either issue.

Why this happens

Single-letter surnames like "E" (鄂) and "O" (오) are legitimate surnames for many researchers. But Google Scholar's parser assumes any single letter in the author field is an initial, not a surname. So it either:

Moves it around (turning "Siyu E" into "E Siyu")
Treats it as a middle initial (turning "Siyu E" into "S E")
Drops it entirely from citations

The underlying data is correct. Publishers like AIP and ACS have the right names with ORCIDs. Google Scholar stores it correctly too — you can see the right name if you click into paper details. But the display and citation export layers mangle or delete it.

Google Scholar paper detail page listing Yiwen E correctly as first author — Scholar's own paper detail page has the right author list — "Yiwen E, Qi Jin, Anton Tcypkin, X-C Zhang." The data is intact. The mangling happens on the way out.

Example 1: Yiwen E

Profile: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=f378fSAAAAAJ

Display problem. The name appears as "Y E", "E Yiwen", and "E. Yiwen" across different papers on the profile.

Her own publication on her own profile lists her as "Y E" — the surname is gone, the first name is reduced to an initial.

Citation omission. She is the first author on "Terahertz wave generation from liquid water films via laser-induced breakdown" (Applied Physics Letters, 2018). The publisher lists:

Yiwen E, Qi Jin, Anton Tcypkin, X.-C. Zhang

AIP Publishing page for the paper, listing Yiwen E first — The AIP Publishing page for the paper. Yiwen E is the first author. This is the source of truth.

The Google Scholar citation shows:

Jin, Qi, Anton Tcypkin, and X-C. Zhang

Google Scholar search result showing only three authors, omitting Yiwen E — Google Scholar's search result for the same paper: "Q Jin, A Tcypkin, XC Zhang." Three authors. The first author has been deleted.

Google Scholar Cite modal showing all five citation styles missing Yiwen E — Every citation style in the Cite modal omits Yiwen E.

Yiwen E, the first author, is missing. Her three co-authors all appear correctly.

Example 2: Siyu E

Profile: https://scholar.google.com.hk/citations?user=s9RUIJAAAAAJ

Display problem. The name appears as "E Siyu" and "S E" on the profile.

"...Y Guo, S E, M Jin, K Wu..." Surname stripped, first name turned into an initial.

Citation omission. On "Stable Microwave Signal Generation by Heterodyning Dual Lasers Injection-Locked to a Single Microring Resonator" (ACS Photonics, 2025), the publisher lists "Siyu E". Google Scholar's Cite button shows "Guo, Yuyao, Xinhang Li... et al." — Siyu E is missing from the exported citation.

The same erasure happens on a separate paper, "Self-injection-locking FMCW laser source on the lithium niobate platform" (CLEO: Science and Innovations, 2024). Scholar has the correct author list internally:

Google Scholar paper detail page listing Siyu E as the seventh author — "...Yuyao Guo, Siyu E, Minhui Jin, Kan Wu..."

But the search result drops her completely:

Google Scholar search result for the paper, with Siyu E removed from the author list — The search result skips straight from "Y Guo" to "M Jin." Siyu E is gone.

And every Cite format omits her:

Google Scholar Cite modal showing all five citation styles omitting Siyu E — Chicago: "...Yuyao Guo, Minhui Jin et al." Siyu E should be between them. She is not.

Control: Western names work fine

A researcher named "John Smith" will display as "J Smith" consistently across 20+ publications. The parser handles Western multi-letter surnames correctly every time.

The disparity

Western surnames: always displayed correctly, always credited in citations.
Single-letter surnames: mangled on profiles, omitted from citation exports.

The bug specifically affects researchers based on ethnic naming patterns. Single-character surnames that romanize to a single letter — like "E" (鄂) and "O" (오) — appear across Chinese and Korean populations and number in the tens of thousands globally.

Impact

Who: researchers with single-letter surnames, predominantly East Asian.
Scale: thousands potentially affected globally.
Harm: Google Scholar's primary citation export feature produces author lists that omit these researchers. Every user who copies that citation perpetuates the error.

This is not cosmetic but rather a citation laundering problem. Google's tool is generating and spreading incomplete citations at scale, and the omission predominantly affects certain ethnicities.

Reproduction

Go to https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=f378fSAAAAAJ (Yiwen E's profile).
Search for "Terahertz wave generation from liquid water films via laser-induced breakdown" from the main page.
Click "Cite".
Observe: Yiwen E (first author) is missing.
Compare to the AIP publisher page where she's listed first.

Suggested fix

When publisher metadata contains a single-letter surname, preserve it as a surname rather than filtering it as noise. The correct data already exists in Google's system - this is a parsing-layer bug, not a data-layer bug.

Timeline

Jan 21, 2026 — Report submitted to Google Abuse VRP.

Jan 21, 2026 (≈12 hours later) — Auto-acknowledgement received: "We'll investigate the issue you've reported and get back to you once we have an update."

Jan 22, 2026 — Case closed. Response, in full:

Thanks for reaching out! We've looked into your report and determined it's not a technical security vulnerability. Because of this, we won't be able to take action on it and have closed the case. You can reach out to Google Scholar directly for this type of issue; their support contact information is available at https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/help.html#corrections.

The link leads to the end-user help page for individual profile corrections. It cannot fix a systemic parsing bug.

Jan 22, 2026 — I requested reconsideration, noting the report was filed under Abuse VRP — which exists for issues like algorithmic bias — and asked for it to be escalated to Trust & Safety or a fairness team.

Feb 4, 2026 — Follow-up requesting a status update. No response.

Feb 27, 2026 — Final follow-up. I noted that no one had disputed the bug exists, no one had pointed me at an appropriate team, and no action had been taken. I gave notice that if there was no path forward I'd bring public attention to it.

No further reply was ever received.

Why I'm posting this

It grinded my gears that a legitimate bug that affects people solely because of their name would exist on a platform as large as Google Scholar.

The fact that Google is aware of it too (I'm not the first person to find this believe it or not) made me want to get as much exposure as possible for it.

The truth of the matter with bug bounty programs is that you will get pennies on the dollar for your findings - I've had multiple bugs approved that were deemed severe enough to warrant a fix but not severe enough for a payout. If companies can find an excuse to not pay researchers, they will take it every single time. Sometimes, if no excuse can be found, then you just get ignored.

I think it is unwise to ignore an at-scale bug that mainly affects researchers of a specific ethnicity, but Google seems to think differently. After all, when you are one of the largest companies in the tech space, who will tell you no?

The bug is still live as of this writing. Anyone can verify the reproduction steps in under a minute. Researchers with single-letter surnames are still being silently dropped from Google Scholar citations every day, and the citations that get copy-pasted into other papers carry the omission forward.

If you're a researcher with a single-letter surname who has been affected, or if you have additional examples, I'd like to hear from you: contact@matthewearnest.dev.