Publishing - Legal vs. Preferred Name

[ThousandsHardships]

I'm thinking a little ahead of myself, but as I'm transforming my resume into a CV, I'm starting to wonder, for future publication purposes, whether I should use my legal name or my preferred name. As with many 1.5 generation immigrants, I have a foreign legal name and another English name that I go by.

My situation is complicated by the fact that I have co-authored publications (not to mention filed my M.S. thesis) under my legal name. Normally, consistency would make the most sense, and there's always a possibility that certain places may not allow you to use a preferred name. At the same time, however, a lot of people I meet do not know me by my legal name, which means that using my legal name may pose problems as I advance further in my field. In addition, my new field is completely unrelated to my previous field. If I can progress further in this direction, I may even consider eliminating previous publications from my CV altogether, which makes consistency a non-issue. These things indicate that using my preferred name would be better in the long run.

Thoughts? Opinions?

Edited February 16, 2017 by ThousandsHardships

[akraticfanatic]

I don't have any experience with publication myself, but I don't think it's unusual to use a preferred name-- lots of people use their initials or go by their middle name. It makes sense to use the name you go by if that's what people know you as. 

[fuzzylogician]

Pick whatever you're comfortable with as soon as possible and run with it. It doesn't have to be your legal name. If you have older publications under another name, you could have a short statement on your website on how to cite them now (often I see people say something like "New Name. (Year). "Publication title". Publication details. (Originally published under [original name])". That way you get to keep all your publications on your CV. I've also seen people just switch and keep the old publications under their old name and new publications under their new name. It's your choice, but the earlier you make it the easier it'll be. 

[TakeruK]

Seconding fuzzy's answer. You can publish under any name you want and at this early stage in your career, it's a good time to select the name you want to use! 

To add to fuzzy's suggestion, another thing you can do (at least in my field) is to bold your name in the publications listing of your CV so you can bold your original name as well as your new name. You can also just make a little subtitle at the time of the name change and say something like "All my publications prior to [date] were published as [name]".

[GreenEyedTrombonist]

There's definitely no rule saying you have to publish under your legal name. I think everyone's hit it pretty much on the head, but I just wanted to contribute my own story. I'm a freelance writer who writes under two names and a graduate student in a terminal MA program. I also just finalized my divorce last fall. I made a point to never let anything I wrote be credited with my married name since I knew it would change once my divorce was finalized (my two writing names are my now legal name and the screen name I use everywhere). This was a pretty easy process for academic publications (I've worked on a few research projects with public deliverables and presentations) as I just made a request with the research leads prior to publishing.