Occassionally, I Google myself. I have a unique name (I'd even venture to say I'm the only person with my name), so it's easy to do. That in and of itself is good and bad, but that's another post. At any rate, if there are web hits, it's most likely me. What I discovered this go around, was that an article I wrote in 2005 was cited in a library school student's paper. That's kind of cool. And, odd. My article was listed in the List of References, but I couldn't find where I was cited anywhere in the paper. Now, when I wrote papers, I did not list sources in my bibliography unless I used information from them and if I did I cited them in text as well.
The other down side. The column editor was given co-author status in the citation. I find this a little unnerving. She asked me to write the article and turned it in. She contributed nothing to the actual article, yet anyone looking at the citation will assume she contributed at least half of the article. Sigh.
All in all though, it's pretty cool to have an article cited by someone else. It just goes to show that regardless of what you think when you submit an article (I thought no one outside the state of Arkansas would read it), once it's indexed in a database, others will read it.
And, in an interesting side note, I found what appeared to be a reference to another article I wrote on Monster.com of all things. However, when I went to see how it was cited, the link is no longer good. That just gets my curiosity going. And, again shows that you never know how a published article will be referenced or by whom.
