Managing your research identity is an important part of maintaining and safeguarding your professional profile. Managing your research identity will help to ensure that your research:
While the use of author identifiers has been most prevalent in the sciences, it is also becoming more common in the humanities.
ORCID, Scopus Author Identifier and Publons (ResearcherID) are the most well-known author identification systems that enable author recognition across different databases, countries and languages. These systems provide you with a place where you can manage your research identity and share your professional information.
Scopus and Publons are publisher-driven systems (Elsevier and Thomson Reuters, respectively), while an international non-profit organization develops and supports the ORCID platform. In order to save time and effort in managing data, these systems have some linking abilities (i.e. ORCID can import from Scopus)
There are other author identifiers in current use (https://project-thor.readme.io/docs/author-identifier-catalogue) that you may encounter if you are in a specific discipline, but the concept is the same across all of these systems.
Portions of this guide adapted from Cardiff University and the University of Pittsburgh
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