Author identifiers
AUTHOR IDENTIFIERS
Author identifiers are used to standardise an author's name and affiliation and to group all of his or her publications together under one single identifier. Author identifiers also give greater visibility to an author’s scientific production and facilitate the process of compiling and sharing that author’s publications.
Different initiatives have been developed on an international level to clearly and unequivocally identify authors and researchers and facilitate the handling of their works
Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID)
This is a unique identifier developed by ORCID, an international not-for-profit organisation. It is an independently-run, free-of-charge identification system that has no links to any company or institution.
ORCID provides a ‘persistent digital identifier’ which distinguishes each researcher, having the additional advantage of being compatible with other identification systems such as Scopus Author Identifier, ResearcherID, Iralis and so on. ORCID has become a very effective tool for linking publications and documents deriving from research activities which had been listed in different sources (databases, information portals, open-access repositories and so on.)
The ORCID community includes both individual researchers and universities, laboratories, commercial research organisations, publishers, international professional organisations and other entities.
Researchers themselves are responsible for linking their publications to their ORCID identifier. Mondragon Unibertsitatea Library can assist you in creating your ORCID identifier and linking your scientific production. Please contact us (INTERNAL link to Consult IN Library).
IRALIS International Registry of Authors-Links to Identify Scientists
IRALIS is a system for standardising the signatures of scientific authors. It is personal and free of charge. Its aim is to create an international record of authorities and to remind scientific authors of the importance of creating their signature, so that these authors can be cited correctly and so that their scientific production can be more easily compiled. The idea is to collect all of the variants of a signature that are used by each author and to standardise these in one unique format.
This is an initiative which has been designed, above all, with Spanish-speaking countries in mind, since more ambiguities arise in such countries due to the length of author signatures and the fact that the first surnames of authors do not appear in the author signature as is customary in the English-speaking world.
WOS ResearcherID
Publons is the platform where you can manage you Web of Science ResearcherID. You can add your publications, track you citations and manage your Web of Science record.
Researcher themselves are responsible for linkine their publications to their ResearcherID.
Scopus Author Identifier
Scopus assigns an identifier to each author automatically. This identifier aggregates all of the documents that the author has produced, regardless of how these have been signed. Documents are assigned automatically using an algorithm based on the name of the author, his or her affiliation, supervision, subject area, sources in which he or she is frequently published, publication dates, citations and co-authorship reports, etc.
Although the platform assigns identifiers automatically, it provides an Author Feedback tool which enables the information to be corrected or updated.
Standardising author names in other platforms
There are many platforms which can help you to standardise your author name. Google Scholar is a simple and useful tool which enables you to create personal profiles in 3 basic steps:
- It keeps track of all of your publications that are indexed in the search engine
- It standardises all of the potential name variations that have been found
- It compiles citations from publications associated with your personal profile
As an author, you may use the Google Scholar Citations tool to select your documents from all of the production indexed by Google Scholar.
For more information about Google Scholar profiles, please read:
How to set up a personal profile on Google Scholar