Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Here’s how you know

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

This is a preview of updates coming to the Technical Bulletin's website in April 2026. Return to current site.
Read more about the modernization release schedule in this announcement.
Comment via the yellow feedback button in the lower right hand corner of the page. Contact the NLM Help Desk with any questions or concerns.

This is archived content.

Links may have become inactive over time. Visit Archive-It   to find the original published layout.

Author and Affiliation Transliteration Policy for Cyrillic-Script Journals

Koppel S. Author and Affiliation Transliteration Policy for Cyrillic-Script Journals. NLM Tech Bull. 2015 May-Jun;(404):e7.

May 18, 2015 [posted]

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is updating its policy for author name and affiliation transliteration in Cyrillic-script journals indexed for MEDLINE.

For many years indexers have used the ALA-LC Romanization Tables to transliterate (convert to the Roman alphabet) author names in Cyrillic-script journals, which publish articles in Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Macedonian, and other Cyrillic-script languages. Publishers of Roman-alphabet journals may or may not follow the ALA-LC Romanization Tables; they often accept the author’s transliteration or use other transliteration standards. Therefore it has been possible for a Russian author, for example, to have his or her name appear in PubMed/MEDLINE in multiple transliterated formats.

Example:
Kaliuzhnaia OV (From a Russian language journal; see PMID: 25474883.)
Kaluzhnaya OV (From an English language journal; see PMID: 23831449.)

In response to expectations of authors who wish to see their names consistently transliterated in PubMed/MEDLINE records, and to clarify the NLM policy for Cyrillic-script author affiliations, the transliteration policy is being updated as follows:

New Policy for Author Names in Cyrillic-Script Journals
Author names will be presented in PubMed/MEDLINE records exactly as they are transliterated and published by Cyrillic-script journals.

If author names are published by the journal only in Cyrillic script they will be transliterated into Roman script according to the transliteration rules outlined in the ALA-LC Romanization Tables.

Clarification of Policy for Author Affiliations in Cyrillic-Script Journals
Author affiliations in Cyrillic-script journals will be presented in PubMed/MEDLINE citations as they are published by the journal, that is, transliterated, translated into English, or in Cyrillic script.

Effective Date of New Policy
The new policy was effective for citations with a publication date of 2015 and later that have not been processed when the policy is announced.