Faculty Services: Managing your Research Identity

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:

• stays with you throughout your career;
• is linked to you rather than someone with a similar name;
• remains linked to you if you change your name;
• remains linked to you when you change jobs or departments and have a new institutional affiliation;
• meets publication and funding application requirements: foundations, government agencies and publishers increasingly require an author identifier to submit grant applications and manuscripts for publication.
• is easier for people to find;
• is in one place that will help in maintaining your CV for promotion and tenure;
• generates citation metrics and shows that your research is making an impact.

While the use of author identifiers has been most prevalent in the sciences, it is also becoming more common in the humanities.

The WikiData entry for McDaniel College is here: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q6800835, which references all of the unique IDs assigned to the college, such as ISNI, IPEDs, Ringgold, ROR etc. and is a useful reference for researchers, as granting agencies and publishers often require one or more of these unique IDs for submission.

ORCID, Scopus Author Identifier and Web of Science (previously known as ResearcherID or Publons) 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 Web of Science are publisher-driven systems (Elsevier and Clarivate, 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