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Scholarly Communications

Author IDs

Unique identifiers that help researchers distinguish themselves from others with similar names and associate themselves with their work.

An author ID ensures authorship is attributed to the right person. By making sure credit is appropriately given for publications and creative works, it can help researchers follow the work of a specific author more easily.
For example, consider the difficulty of trying to find works by John David Smith by searching for the author’s name, if the author’s works are attributed inconsistently to:

  • Smith, J.
  • Smith, J.D.
  • Smith, John D.
  • Misspellings, etc.

Author IDs are unique identifiers that consistently connect authors to their publications regardless of publisher formatting styles, name changes or varying author preferences.

ORCID


While some database platforms (such as Scopus) create author profiles to disambiguate names within their platform, ORCID author IDs can be used across many publishing platforms and can identify authors for other reasons, such as in grant applications. ORCID is a non-profit organization that is supported by a global consortium of academic and research institutions, professional associations, and libraries (https://orcid.org/members). Creating a persistent author ID is free with ORCID.
Aside from formal publications and conference papers and posters, ORCIDs can be applied to other forms of scholarly and creative work, such as:

  • Intellectual property (patents, copyright registrations, trademarks, etc)
  • Artistic performances
  • Datasets and data management plans
  • Physical objects
  • Software
  • Lectures related to research
  • Technical standards
  • etc. (see What work types does ORCID support?)

Best Practices (ORCID)


To maximize visibility of research and minimize time spent managing ORCID profiles, the following is recommended (see ORCID for Researchers):

  • Make your profile publicly visible
  • Add your ID into publisher, funder, and institutional profiles
  • ORCID IDs can be linked with author profiles for journals and bibliographic databases. To provide visibility to an ORCID ID in their Google Scholar profiles, authors may enter their ORCID url as their “Homepage” or, if another homepage exists, they can place it on that page.
  • Integrate with Datacite, Crossref, and Publons, to automate adding of your new publications