A google search with my name yields more than 518,000 results. Nah, I am not popular (I wish!) but it turns out that there are a lot of “Gaurav Trivedi”s in this world. Yes, with the same first name and the last name. A search on Facebook will give you results along with their pictures as well. So I do share my name with loads of “real” people. For the first time I wished that my parents had given me a middle name. It would have been easier to stand out.
Fortunately, I have been using a systematic strategy to use trivedigaurav as an identifier for myself online (You have been notified now!). For example, this site: www.trivedigaurav.com and on Twitter (@trivedigaurav). Now that I do know that so many others with the same name exist; I have come to a realisation that I’ve been quite lucky to have that ID available for me, specially on popular sites. I am proud of the 5-year old me who could think ahead 😉
But as an aspiring researcher, is this something that I should be concerned about? Would it be a good idea to have a pen-name now that I’d be starting to author more relevant academic writings? Here’s a question on StackExchange that deals with the same problem.
Update 8/24/17:
I got myself an Orcid ID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8472-2139, but haven’t really made use of it yet!