CBE - Postgraduate and Research Support: Researcher Visibility

In the context of research, unique author identifiers are one way to solve the problem of author ambiguity. Being able to consistently and accurately identify the author of a piece of research is valuable for researchers (because it means you can quickly find other work by the same author and ensure your own work is linked to you) and for administrators and librarians (because it’s vital to be able to manage and report on the research your institution has produced). (Source)

Several unique author identifiers have been developed to address this issue in recent years, but the three main ones are:

• ORCID (developed by ORCID Inc., which is a non-profit, community-driven organisation, based in the USA but with international membership).
• Scopus Author ID (developed by Elsevier and used in Scopus and related products); 
• ResearcherID (developed by Thomson Reuters and used in Web of Science and related products);
• Google Scholar Author Profile provides a simple way for authors to keep track of citations to their articles. You can check who is citing your publications, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics

Find out why is important as a researcher to have unique author identifiers and how to create them