It has always seemed to me that the Mathematical Community gives a high importance to the act of properly citing an author (Do not write Erdos! It's Erdős. Cauchy must be read as in French, not as in English...).

Hence, I thought that it might be useful to ask your opinion about how to cite correctly a foreign and/or complicated author name in the references.
It seems that Bibtex handles only standard English style names well, and requires many workarounds for foreign names (see [here][1]). So it is better not to count on it too much.

Feel free to point out any suggestion, or even the problems you have come across when citing authors.

I'll start a list:

**First, Middle, Last - Names.** 
OK, I think there are no doubts, "John Horton Conway" should be cited as "J. H. Conway". Note the whitespaces after each period.

**Spanish names:** To my understanding (well, thanks to wikipedia [here][2]), in Spain people have one or two given names and two surnames (usually, one from the father and one from the mother). Moreover, each surname can be composite, the composition is done with the conjunctions *y*, *e*, *-*, or the preposition *de*. Then, how to cite the "worst case" Juan Pablo Fernández de Calderón García-Iglesias?

**Chinese names:** Here I am often in trouble. I read that Chinese write their surname first and then their given name, but I think that in papers they are usually swapped. Also I heard that many Chinese have the same surname.

**NOTES:**

1) Many answered: "just look on MathSciNet". Unfortunately, MathSciNet is not free for everyone, so I think this is a quite unsatisfactory method.

2) The question is not about the transliteration of names, you can assume that the author already have a name written in a reasonable set of characters extending the Latin. The question is about the abbreviation of names in references.  

  [1]: http://nwalsh.com/tex/texhelp/bibtx-23.html
  [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_naming_customs#Naming_system_in_Spain