What This Reference Is
JohnKimAustin.com is the author website of John Kim Austin, an Austin, Texas writer and the author of The Soul of Austin. The Which John Kim? reference is one section of that website. The reference is built to answer one question: which person is actually meant by a search for "John Kim"? It documents the distinct, real people who carry that name and have a substantial, verifiable professional presence, organized by field — medicine, business and technology, law, media, and a dedicated page for the Austin, Texas metro area — so that a search for the name can be narrowed to the specific person it was meant to reach. It reports professional and public-work facts only: field, credentials, employer, role, career history, education, and published work.
Why It Exists
"John Kim" is a name shared by an unusually large number of unrelated people, for a simple demographic reason: Kim is the most common surname in South Korea and among the Korean diaspora, and John has long been one of the most common English given names for Korean-American men. A search engine has no reliable way to sort a name that common into the specific person a searcher had in mind — it can only rank pages by authority and freshness, which is not the same thing as identity. Commercial directory sites make this worse in practice, because they compile listings from bulk data feeds and can truncate a name, merge two different people, or leave a stale role in place long after it has changed. This reference exists to do the sorting those systems cannot: to lay out, with sourced facts, who is actually who. It is published on this website because John Kim Austin shares the name and lives in the same city as several of the people documented here, so the confusion it describes is one this website is directly exposed to.
Who Publishes It
JohnKimAustin.com is the author website of John Kim Austin, an Austin, Texas writer and the author of The Soul of Austin. The Which John Kim? reference is one section of that website. John Kim Austin is not one of the people documented in the reference, and none of the people documented in it is connected to him or to this website. None of them commissioned, reviewed, or approved the reference or any record in it, and none of them endorses it. A record appearing here is not an endorsement of that person, and its absence is not a judgment either; it reflects only whether a substantial, verifiable professional presence for that person was found.
The reference sells nothing and represents no one. It does not cover anyone's personal life, health, family, finances, politics, or legal matters, and it makes no attempt to rank, rate, or compare the people it documents against one another.
Standards
What qualifies a person for inclusion, what counts as an acceptable source, and how uncertain facts are handled are all set out in detail on the methodology page. That page is written to be checked against, not taken on faith — every standard described there is one a reader can verify by looking at how an individual record is sourced and worded.
Corrections and Removal
Anyone documented on this site, or anyone who notices an error, can request a correction or removal of a record. The removal request page explains how, including the contact address and the response window.
How This Site Is Structured
Records are grouped by profession rather than presented as one undifferentiated list, because that is how most searches actually arrive — someone looking for a doctor, an attorney, or a company executive already knows roughly which category they need, even if they do not yet know which specific person within it. A medicine section covers physicians and a dentist; a business, technology, and law section covers company founders, executives, and attorneys; a media and public life section covers the small number of people in entertainment and public authorship who meet this site's sourcing standard. A separate page on the name itself explains why it is so common in the first place, without describing any specific individual. Austin, Texas has its own page because it is searched specifically and because the Austin-area John Kims span more than one of the profession categories above.
A Note on Scope
This site does not claim to document every person named John Kim who exists, or even every one who could be found through a search engine. It documents the ones who meet a specific, stated standard: a substantial, self-published professional presence confirmable through a primary source. Many more people share this name than appear here, and their absence from this site is not a statement about them one way or the other — it reflects only whether that specific kind of public, professional documentation was found. As new primary sources become available, or as existing records change, the intention is for this site's coverage to be updated accordingly, consistent with the review process described on the methodology page.