A common mistake is to exchange the author's first name and family. I am Mahmoud OMID but I saw someone referenced me as O. MAHMOUD! Partially it is because we can not distinguish between so many authors throughout the worlds what are their first names or family names. Another common mistake is the Copy& Pasting attitude from different sources. Anyway, It does not make much difference for those who write lots of papers. 

I think this is due to bad spelling correction.

Simply, because authors are not very careful!

Just sloppy work. Names cannot be controlled by spelling techniques.

I agree with Costas. It is often a matter of not being careful

Dear Marcel,

I think authors, if the fault was in the manuscript. If the spelling error occurs after acception by the editor, they will be responsible.

A question: Do you have or did you have some problems with this wrong spelling?

And I noticed it in publications from colleagues

I also noticed there might be a link with the complexity of the name, e.g. foreign names or names with unusual symbols. Here again, what is the role of the editors, referees or authors? Perhaps some people are overloaded with other activities (e.g. too much manuscripts to read or to write)

A common mistake is to exchange the author's first name and family. I am Mahmoud OMID but I saw someone referenced me as O. MAHMOUD! Partially it is because we can not distinguish between so many authors throughout the worlds what are their first names or family names. Another common mistake is the Copy& Pasting attitude from different sources. Anyway, It does not make much difference for those who write lots of papers. 

Artists, like writers of novels, can use names that differ from what is indicated on their passport. Do you know examples in science?

Authors` names are wrongly spelled when they are cited in the reference list of publications. I believe this is rarely occurred. In most cases, these mistakes are due to different languages, different accents, and different letters.

@Mahmoud,

you point it. I´m very doubtful, which name is the first name and which is the family name. I even don´t know, if this procedure to name somebody is used in all societies. Therefore I could imagine to be mistaken when writing names or adressing sombody.

Your personal example must be corrected, because your citing rate would disapear.

Small errors like omitting the points above a letter, an accent , an umlaut, double s instead of ß,  etc. are not so important.

Dear  @Hanno. I capitalized my family. My family is OMID but Mahmoud which is common like Mohammad in Islamic countries is my first name.

You are right. As I said It happened to me once. The paper which made the mistake was published in a not famous (without IF) journal so I did not write to them for Coriigendom follow-up.

Perhaps somebody did already a sample study of X journals to check whether it occurs frequently, and in what conditions. I noticed it myself several times in journals varying in IF.

Dear Dr. Marcel M. Lambrechts

In my opinion, it starts from the manuscript itself. In fact, sometimes the first or corresponding author does not check the spelling of coauthor's names while passing the final copy of the manuscript for review prior to submission, in spite of them signing an authorship consent list.

After that, and depending on the indexing tools, automatic indexing could also incorporate spelling mistakes for names other than in English, since they are mostly customize for that spelling.

And the final safety line back into reference lists resides on the copy-editing work, since references have to be corrected by consulting the original document, that is, the cited article at the official page of the journal, to avoid any mistakes. Most of the time the references are automatically harvested from databases without further verification with originals.

That is the hurdless of citation stats nowadays, and another element for the specialization in the field of scientific writing and editing.

Sincerely

Ernesto Galbán Rodríguez