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case was closed roughly twelve hours later with a boilerplate "not a security vulnerability" reply pointing me to an outdated Google Scholar general help page - which funny enough was also broken.

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 systematically drops researchers with single-letter surnames from the citations exported by its "Cite" button. The two I document below - "E" (鄂, Chinese) and "O" (오, Korean) - are uncommon but legitimate surnames in their respective naming traditions. Click Cite on one of these researchers' papers, copy the result, and their name isn't there. Their co-authors are.

The underlying database links still work. Profiles exist, citation counts accumulate. But the citation that gets pasted into the next paper has the affected researcher erased. Researchers with multi-letter surnames don't experience this.

How it manifests

The omission shows up in two places that matter:

• The author strip in Google Scholar's search results
• The citation produced by the Cite button (across every available citation style)

I can only observe the inputs (publisher data) and outputs (what Scholar shows). I don't have visibility into where in the pipeline the failure happens - it could be from a variety of causes. What's clear is that the publisher source data is trustworthy: AIP and ACS hand off the right names with ORCIDs. On the two papers I screenshotted in detail below, Scholar's paper-detail page also has the right author list, but the Cite button still drops the affected researcher.

On other papers, the same researcher is missing from every Scholar surface, including the detail page - another caveat worth mentioning.

Example 1: Yiwen E

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

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."

However, the Google Scholar citation shows "Jin, Qi, Anton Tcypkin, and X-C. Zhang." Yiwen E is missing from the list while her three co-authors all appear correctly.

Example 2: Siyu E

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

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:

But the search result drops her completely:

And every Cite format omits her:

Example 3: Joo Hyun O

Profile: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=43Xk9yQAAAAJ

Joo Hyun O is an Associate Professor of Nuclear Medicine at the Catholic University of Korea. The single-letter "O" romanization of 오 is rare in academic publishing - most people with this surname use "Oh" - but he's one of the few who use the single-letter form, and he's hit by the same bug.

His most-cited paper is "Practical PERCIST: A Simplified Guide to PET Response Criteria in Solid Tumors 1.0" (Radiology, 2016, 549 citations). The publisher lists him first.

Search the paper from Google Scholar's main page and click Cite. Every citation style drops him; the search-result author strip reads "MA Lodge, RL Wahl" - Joo Hyun O is gone from a citation that 549 other papers have already incorporated.

The audit

The case studies above show how the omission looks on individual papers. To find out how often it actually fires, I went through three single-letter-surname researchers' Scholar profiles and clicked Cite on every paper, counting the ones where the affected researcher was missing from the exported citation in every available citation style. (Joo Hyun O is documented as a single high-impact case above but not yet included in the audit table - he is credited in many papers and I have not been able to comb through his entire profile yet.)

A few notes on methodology. Papers I couldn't fully verify were excluded (three for Yiwen E). For Jian-Yu E I excluded one paper with around 40 authors where his position in the list might be lost to legitimate truncation rather than the surname bug, keeping the audit conservative. The rate counts only papers where the researcher was omitted from every citation style in the Cite modal. Papers where some styles included them and others didn't were not counted as omissions. Other failure modes (mangling and role reversal) were observed across all three profiles but are not rolled into the omission rate.

The omission rate ranges from roughly one in six to roughly one in three of their published work. Though their numbers may be few, these researchers are being measurably harmed by Google Scholar's handling of their surname. For these researchers, this is not an edge case. Yiwen E's most-cited paper, on which she is first author, is one of the 21 omissions.

And on every one of those omitted papers, the other authors come through fine. The citations aren't broken; they're selectively broken on this one category of name. A reader copying any of these citations into their own paper would have no idea anyone was missing.

Control: Western names work fine

A researcher named "John Smith" will display consistently across 20+ publications. Multi-letter surnames render correctly every time.

Impact

• Who: researchers with single-letter surnames, predominantly East Asian.
• Failure rate per researcher audited: 17.5%–32.3% of papers (3 of 11, 7 of 40, and 21 of 65 respectively).
• Harm: Google Scholar's primary citation export feature produces author lists that omit these researchers from a meaningful share of their own publications. Every user who copies that citation perpetuates the error into the next paper.

This is not cosmetic but rather a citation laundering problem. Google's tool is generating and spreading incomplete citations, and the omission falls along ethnic lines.

Reproduction

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

Suggested fix

The bug fires inconsistently across Scholar records. The publisher metadata is consistently correct, but Scholar's handling of that metadata varies. Sometimes the researcher's name is preserved on the paper detail page and only dropped at the Cite step; sometimes the researcher is missing from every Scholar surface for that record, including the detail page. I don't have visibility into what drives the inconsistency.

The inconsistency is itself part of the harm. An affected researcher can't easily detect a bug that sometimes erases them and sometimes doesn't, and a reader copying a citation has no way to tell whether they're getting an accurate author list or an incomplete one.

The fix is straightforward in intent if not in implementation: at every step of Scholar's pipeline that handles author names, single-letter surnames need to be treated as surnames.

Timeline

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

Jan 21, 2026 (about 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 bug in the data pipeline.

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.

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.