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Scholarly Communications: Author Identity

This guide provides useful information on scholarly publishing, such as finding the best journal, author identity, or promoting publications and communications.

Why is Author Identity important?

Author IDs help to ensure that your work can be easily identified, and properly credited and attributed to you. ORCID is a unique persistent digital identifier that links all of your research output and distinguishes you from other researchers. Researchers can register for their own identifier free of charge at the ORCID website.

Many funders and publishers now ask researchers to provide their ORCID identifier when submitting proposals or manuscripts, so it is important to keep your listing up-to-date with new publications. ORCID can also link to many of the author profiles and IDs on major databases, such as Scopus and ResearcherID and import the details of your existing publications from these sources and more.

For more information on registering and using ORCID, see our ORCID Libguide.

What is ORCID?

ORCID (Open Researcher & Contributor ID) is a registry of unique identifiers for researchers and scholars that is open, non-profit, transparent, mobile and community-based.

ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and contributor and supports automated linkages across all your professional activities.

ORCID provides two core functions:

  • a registry where you can obtain a unique identifier and manage a record of activities
  • APIs that support system-to system communication and authentication

ORCID is available free of charge to individuals, who may obtain an ORCID identifier, manage their record of outputs and activities, and search for others in the registry.

Who is using ORCID?

Publishers and Presses including eLife Sciences, Elsevier, Wiley, Public Library of Science, Hindawi and Institute of Physics Publishing.

Research Institutions such as CERN, Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, National Institutes of Health and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Funding Agencies including U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, The Wellcome Trust, Japan Science and Technology Agency, UK National Institute of Health Research

Learned Societies and Professional Associations such as: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); American Chemical Society; IEEE; Optical Society; Modern Lanaguage Association, and many more

Scholarly Sharing Service Providers including  Almetric, Dryad, Peerage of Science, CrossRef, FigShare etc.

Major Research Universities including Texas A&M, Harvard University, Cal Tech, MIT, University of Michigan etc.

Scopus Author ID and ResearcherID

Scopus Author ID

The Scopus database automatically assigns an ID profile to authors to help identify and link their publications. If you have several name variants or you have changed affiliations, your publications may be spread over a number of different author profiles.

You can check your current Scopus author ID and publications by running an author search on Scopus using your name and current affiliation. You can manage your profile and check your publications are correct using the Scopus to ORCID wizard which will then link the publications associated with your Scopus author ID with your ORCID.


Publons (formerly ResearcherID)

ResearcherID is a unique identifier used to distinguish your publications on the Web of Science database, and is now fully integrated with Clarivate Analytics' Publons platform. Once you have registered, you can identify and claim your publications indexed in Web of Science, and your ResearcherID will then be associated with these works and they will be added to your Publons profile. You can also import publications to your Publons profile using ORCID.

Keeping these profiles up to date, and ensuring that Scopus and Web of Science records accurately reflect your publication history, is important to help ensure that the citation metrics and analysis which these databases provide are also accurate. For example, if some of your publications are not attributed correctly to your Scopus author ID, Scopus will not include any citations to these when calculating the corresponding bibliometric indicators for your profile, such as citations per publication and your h-index.