Your time is valuable.  There’s never enough hours in your week, let alone a day.  With SSRN’s registered author number approaching 300,000 we understand finding your co-author can be a bit like “Where’s Waldo?” – a real challenge, but without the striped shirt. You spent precious time trying to figure out which “John Smith” or “Li Li” was the co-author of your submission. But from now on, you can put that time into your research instead!

SSRN authors and submitters can now search for co-authors on our submission form using email addresses, as well as names. This will make it easier to identify the correct co-author even when multiple accounts are listed under the same name, or when a co-author displays their name differently than the name you are using to search. We’ve also removed the limit on the number of names that display in the search results, ensuring authors with common or short names are visible and available for selection.

Here are a few other handy tricks for using our improved co-author search:

• To narrow your search to exact matches when searching an author’s name, enter their first or last name (whichever is more unique) into the search field in quotes. Searching for a name without quotes will produce a list of exact matches as well as other names that include the search term.
• Use the “Co-Authors and Assistant History” section above the search area to quickly find authors you included on previous submissions.
• Not finding your co-author? Click “Search Results: SSRN members with No Papers Currently on SSRN” at the bottom of the search results to view more.

We hope this functionality gives you a few minutes back in your day, so that you can spend more time writing great papers and doing important research.