Manage Author Identity

How

• Get an ORCID identifier at orcid.org
• Link Scopus and Web of Science identifiers to ORCID

Why

• ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from other researchers, ties all of your outputs together, is increasingly required in journal submissions and grant applications, and allows linkages between research activities and organizations.

Making Sure People Know You are You

Author "name ambiguity" is a big problem in the research community, with many researchers having the same or similar names.  Unique author identifier systems have been developed to address this problem.  Some advantages to registering for a unique identifier are

• to distinguish your work from that of other authors
• to link your works together when calculating research metrics
• to make it easier to link your work to researcher profile systems
• to link your works together when you have published under a different name or variations of the same name
• some journals and funding agencies have begun to require ORCID IDs when making submissions.

To start, get an ORCID ID if you don't already have one. Since some publishers are already requiring ORCIDs when submitting manuscripts, you may already have one.  ORCID is primarily a registry of unique identifiers for researchers (see the Author Identifiers page in the Research Impact Guide but, once you fill in the available fields and make it public, it makes a very nice, professional-looking profile.  

In addition to the Works section, the ORCID profile has places to list your employment history, education and qualifications, memberships and service, funding, alternative names that you've published under, keywords describing your scholarly interests, additional email addresses, and links to your websites or other profiles.  You can also easily get html code to display your ORCID ID as a link to use on websites or get a QR code that will link to your profile.  Adding your publications automatically from other systems is described more fully in this help guide.

What's more, if you connect your ORCID to Scopus and Web of Science, not only will your publications from those databases come into your profile but your ORCID ID will filter back into the databases so that when your name appears on a publication, there will be a link to your ORCID profile.  

Example of ORCID ID in a Scopus record