Scholar Identification Systems: Introduction

Have you ever tried to search your name in an index to see which of your scholarly publications have been indexed? Below you will find a listing for my name in an index provided by EBSCO. As you can see, there are several different forms of my name in this index.

Several author identification systems have been developed, including ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID), ResearcherID, the Scopus Author Identifier and Google Scholar's Citations system. This guide provides information on these author identification systems, and their advantages and disadvantages, to help authors and researchers decide whether to set up an author identifier of their own.

Author identifiers serve several purposes:

• Helps authors with common names or names that are difficult to search identify and claim their publications.
• Can be used to capture all of the articles by an author, because indexes may input names in different formats.
• Allows authors who have changed their names to track past publications.
• Makes it easier to search for work by a specific author (some indexes are adding author IDs).
• Allows authors who may have worked elsewhere to track their past work.
• Promotes connections between research and researchers.
• Increase trust in digital information.