Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Now this is odd...

Just discovered that I've been cited in a publication last summer by the Office of the President of the United States (from the Council of Economic Advisors, apparently): The Cost of Delaying Action to Stem Climate Change. The problem is, I'm cited as a co-author of an article I never wrote.  The citation in the report is as follows:


Edmonds, Jae, Leon Clarke, John Lurz, and J. Macgregor Wise. 2008. “Stabilizing CO2 Concentrations with Incomplete International Cooperation.” Climate Policy 8, 4: 355- 376.

The citation should have listed M. Wise from the University of Maryland College Park (I presume this is Marshall Wise who is cited a couple of other times with some of these same co-authors, and who is probably pretty ticked off that he got his work cited in a report from the Office of the President and they got his name wrong!).  Here's the original article: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.3763/cpol.2007.0469#.VHalXt51Jz8


So my question is: J. Macgregor Wise is a pretty unique name. J. Macgregor is quite different from "M."  Where did the authors of this report get my name from??  I mean, they even got the lower case "g" at the start of "gregor" (and no one ever gets that one right). It's not like they cited "N. Wise" or committed some other typo--they inserted an almost entirely different name. I'm also not an economist or involved with climate change research. Am I in someone's autocorrect (either the computer software version or their subconscious version)?

Weird.