This comment is mostly related to Russian and other names originally existing in Cyrillic.

In literature Refs, we present the authors’ names as they appear in the original publications. There may be small discrepancies between the spelling of the same person’s name across various publications, but the person should be still easy to identify. Typical discrepancies for Cyrillic to Latin transcriptions are w (in German) and v (in English), or st (in German) and sht (in English). There is also a problem with the last name endings: …sky, …skii, …skyi, or ….skaja, …skaya, or …eev, ..eeff, …eyev, etc.

In all the comments and biographic texts, we follow this standard transliteration system.

Another problem is the change in the first name, especially Jewish names which were abundant in Russian empire and early USSR times. It was common to have Jewish name transformed into a more standard (for this country) Slavic or Greek name, e.g. Samuil (or Solomon) into Semen, or Moisha (or Meer) into Mikhail, etc. The original name could have been kept in official documents, but the transformed name was used in publications after a certain date. Fortunately, the majority of people kept the same initials, but there are also exceptions. For example, a rather natural transformation of Hanna into Anna resulted in the change of the initial.

In all biographic texts we try to present all known versions of the name, in order to avoid misunderstandings. We also try to present both versions of the last name for females who changed their name after marriage.