Your Research Identity and Impact: Author IDs

What is a Unique Author Identifier?

An author identifier is a unique identification number that stays with a researcher throughout his or her career.  Wherever he or she goes and whatever his or her name happens to be at the time, the number remains the same.  It is your unique scholarly identity.

Benefits:

• Allows you to establish a unique research presence
• Enables you to promote your research and advertise your publications.  You can add badges with your unique number to your email signature, webpages, blogs, and online CV's.
• Ensures you are getting credit for your work
• Helps link research with the correct authors
• Makes searching easier
• Allows you to search for collaborators.  You can easily evaluate an author's impact in the field.
• Helps clear up issues with naming.  Once an author claims their work, all of those publications will show up when searching by the unique author identifier number.

Many journals, institutions, and funding organizations have implemented unique author identifiers into their process.  Some of these include the National Institutes of Health (NIH), IEEE, U.S. Department of Energy Office Scientific and Technical Information, Modern Language Association (MLA), PLOS, Nature, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Oxford University Press.

The Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) registry provides unique, persistent, non-proprietary identifiers for researchers, creators, and contributors of all types. Your ORCID iD moves with you throughout your career, improving attribution and visibility of your grants, research, scholarship, and creative and entrepreneurial activities. The use of ORCID iDs is fast becoming standard in academia, and many publishers and funders now require them. They are free to obtain, and once up and running, make it easy to connect with CrossRef, ImpactStory, Scopus, Publons, and others. Have an NCBI account? Link your ORCID profile and use the information to populate your SciENcv profile. 

ResearcherID is a unique identifier, similar to ORCID, created by Clarivate Analytics (formerly Thomson Reuters) for use within the Web of Science databases and Publons. This identifier is used to disambiguate author names and provide persistent identification for authors, creators, and contributors. Researchers can use this to claim their scholarly works in the Web of Science databases and Publons, track their research impact by times cited and the H-index, and identify potential collaborators.

Creating a ResearcherID account is free and relatively simple. First, you need to go to the registration page and fill out the registration form. Next, you can use the information that is emailed to you, along with the FAQ page, to complete your account and add your scholarly works from Web of Science. If you have an existing Publons account, you can log in to your existing account to connect it to your ResearcherID.

Once you have successfully created a ResearcherID account, you can connect your account to ORCID through Publons. Log in to your Publons account and follow the instructions to export your ResearcherID record to your ORCID account.

Google Scholar allows individuals to set up profiles with information similar to an online CV.  Individuals can add publications, profile information, contact information, and collaborators.  All you need is a Google account to get started.  Go to "My Profile" to set up your profile.