Faculty Services

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.

ORCID, Scopus Author Identifier and ResearcherID are free 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 ResearcherID 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)

Use the tabs at the left to find out about different author identification options.

Portions of this guide adapted from Cardiff University and the University of Pittsburgh