University Library: Research: Researcher identity

Reasons for managing your researcher identity

Researcher profiles and IDs can be used to:

differentiate your work from the work of other author's with similar names;
quickly and efficiently locate metrics such as citation counts and your h-index for all your publications;
promote your research to others
find potential collaborators

Reduce author ambiguity

Many authors have similar names. Author Identifiers distinguish between these names by assigning each author a unique number and grouping together all of the documents written by that author.

Additionally, author names can be formatted differently. For example, the same author could appear in one document as Lewis, M; in another as Lewis, M.J; and in another as Lewis, Michael. Author Identifiers match the documents an author and groups these name variants together so that authors, even if cited differently, are identified with their specific papers.

Improve research impact

Establishing a unique researcher identity is an important step to improving your research impact. There are a variety of options for creating a unique identity, with ORCID and Scopus Author Identifier being highly recommended.

ORCID

Scopus Author ID

Web Profiles

ORCID

Researcher ID tools compared

	Google Scholar	ORCID	Researcher ID (Web of Science)	ScopusID	ResearchGate	Academia.edu	Selected Works
Publications list	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y	Y
Publications linked	Y	Y	Y	Y	possible	possible	possible
Publication metrics	Y	N	Y	Y	Y	Y	N
Social media links	N	N	N	N	Y	Y	N
Bio, interests & affiliations	Y	Y	Y	N	Y	Y	Y
Uploading papers	N	N	N	N	Y	Y	Y
Adding publication data manually	Y	Y	Y	N	Y	Y	N
Adding publications (semi) automatically	Google Scholar	Crossref + Scopus Pubmed + Datacite ResearcherID + Research Data Australia	Web of Science + ORCID	Scopus	PubMed + BMC	Crossref + PubMed	Research Online

Based on work by Utrecht University Library at libguides.library.uu.nl (CC BY licenced).