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Researcher Identification

Name ambiguity is a recurring issue that impacts research accuracy and quality, career advancement and tenure, global collaboration among researchers  and identification and attribution of funding for institutions and individual authors alike. 
The following tools helps to solve the common problem of author misidentification. 

ResearcherID - Web of Knowledge - Thomson Reuters

ResearcherID is a website where you can register for a unique researcher ID number. You can:  


  • Create a researcher profile;
  • Build an online publication list using Web of Science search services;
  • Generate citation metrics with times cited information for items added from Web of Science, including the H-index, the citation distribution per year, the total Times Cited count and the average Times Cited count;
  • Get links to full text for items added from Web of Science;
  • Add past institution affiliations to your profile;
  • ResearcherID will automatically update times cited counts and citation metrics as data is updated in Web of Science;
  • Link your ResearcherID to your ORCID ID (see below).

Benefits for researchers and students
Researcher ID: Frequently asked questions
Scopus Author Identifier - Elsevier B.V.

The Scopus Author Identifier automatically matches variations of an author’s name and distinguishes between authors with the same name. All the documents belonging to a specific author are listed in the author's details (including numbers of citations received, affiliations, h-index)

View a demonstration or tutorial
Author identifier: Frequently asked questions

Digital Author Identifier - SURFfoundation

The Digital Author Identifier (DAI) is a unique national number assigned to every author who has been appointed to a position at a Dutch university or research institute or has some other relevant connection with one of these organisations. The DAI brings together various different ways of writing the author’s name and distinguishes between authors with the same name. 

ORCID

As you can see different systems use different ways to identify authors. This can be confusing, with great consequences. ORCID - Open Researcher and Contributor ID - is an initiative to solve the author/contributor name ambiguity problem in scholarly communications by creating a central registry of unique identifiers for individual researchers and an open and transparent linking mechanism between ORCID and other current author ID schemes.

Since October 2012, you can create your own ORCID ID, which is a 16-digit number (xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx). You can link your ORCID ID to publications in Scopus, by using the Scopus to ORCID Wizard (click here to see how this works). When you create your publication list using this Wizard, changes will be sent as corrections to Scopus. In 2013 Scopus will incorporate ORCID data into the Scopus profiling process to increase the accuracy of the Scopus Author Profiles. Elsevier’s Publishing Group plans to integrate ORCIDs into the manuscript submission process.

Since March 2013 you can associate your ORCID ID and your ResearcherID, including your publications. In this presentation you can see how you can do this.