This week I was trying to help a client upload their research paper on a journal’s website. Among other author details, I asked for the ORCID numbers of all the authors. None of the authors of that particular article seemed to possess an ORCID number. Some of them had heard of it but did not seem very keen to have a unique ORCID number. They had published earlier and did not seem to understand why an ORCID number was needed. That’s what prompted me to write this post today.
I shall take my own name as an example and talk mostly about the PubMed database for now. In PubMed, in the article bylines, my name appears as ‘Das N’ in most journal articles. Now, if I start looking for all articles on PubMed that are attributed to the author ‘Das N’, I find close to a thousand articles. Only a very small fraction of these articles are authored by me.
You may suggest…why not look for articles by my full name? True. That helps to a large extent and the articles in the search results are fewer. However, many of the articles that pop up in the search results are not mine. The other ‘Natasha Das’ is affiliated to the Department of Biotechnology of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.
When I log into my profile on Google Scholar, each time I need to update my profile. If I don’t edit my profile and I allow Google Scholar to decide which articles must be attributed to me, it will show up a faulty h-index and i10 index. More on these two bibliometric indices later!
This is where unique author identifications come in really handy. There are several such identities that a researcher can choose from…ResearcherID, Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID), International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) etc.
The most commonly used ID in biomedicine is the ORCID. Several editors have implemented ORCID in their journals and several publishers have integrated it into their publishing systems. Though filling up the author identifier data field is optional in most journals today, very soon it may be mandatory to use a unique identifier for each researcher. Several journals across the world have already started endorsing the ORCID initiative and are listing author IDs in the footnotes of each article.
ORCID is creating a world where each researcher can be uniquely identified and connected to the contributions they make to science and their affiliations, “across disciplines, borders, and time”.
I shall take my own name as an example and talk mostly about the PubMed database for now. In PubMed, in the article bylines, my name appears as ‘Das N’ in most journal articles. Now, if I start looking for all articles on PubMed that are attributed to the author ‘Das N’, I find close to a thousand articles. Only a very small fraction of these articles are authored by me.
You may suggest…why not look for articles by my full name? True. That helps to a large extent and the articles in the search results are fewer. However, many of the articles that pop up in the search results are not mine. The other ‘Natasha Das’ is affiliated to the Department of Biotechnology of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur.
When I log into my profile on Google Scholar, each time I need to update my profile. If I don’t edit my profile and I allow Google Scholar to decide which articles must be attributed to me, it will show up a faulty h-index and i10 index. More on these two bibliometric indices later!
This is where unique author identifications come in really handy. There are several such identities that a researcher can choose from…ResearcherID, Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID), International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) etc.
The most commonly used ID in biomedicine is the ORCID. Several editors have implemented ORCID in their journals and several publishers have integrated it into their publishing systems. Though filling up the author identifier data field is optional in most journals today, very soon it may be mandatory to use a unique identifier for each researcher. Several journals across the world have already started endorsing the ORCID initiative and are listing author IDs in the footnotes of each article.
ORCID is creating a world where each researcher can be uniquely identified and connected to the contributions they make to science and their affiliations, “across disciplines, borders, and time”.