Skip to Main Content

ORCID & Author IDs: Unique Author IDs

Name Authority

When publishing an article, consider how unique your name is at your institution or nationally at the research level.   Databases such as Web of Science and Scopus attempt to connect your publications together for impact and h-index calculations.   However, the more common your name is, the more difficult it can be to distinguish you from other authors.   When publishing an article, consider using not only your first name, but your second name or first initial of your second name to help disambiguate your name from other researchers.   

Some databases such as Web of Science and Scopus assign unique author IDs to help connect articles from one author.   However, these author IDs are unique to the specific database, and they may not completely unit all your publications together under one ID if you belong to multiple departments or have worked at multiple institutions.  

Selected Author IDs

Product  Type Registration Scope/Limitations
Open Identifiers
ISNI
(International Standard Name Identifier)		 From ISNI International Agency;  ISO (International Organization for Standardization) certified ISNI gets data from many sources. Search existing IDs on the search page. Apply for an ISNI.
  • Very broad in scope. Includes IDs for authors, researchers, artists, performers, publishers and more.
  • Used primarily for identifying organizations, authors of books, and researchers for a limited number of EU countries
Proprietary Identifiers

Researcher ID

Proprietary - From Thomson Reuters

Fill out the web form, then you'll get an email registration to obtain an ID.
  • Integrated with Web of Science and will link your publications in that database to your ID.
     
  • Can manually add publications not included in Web of Science or import them from another source.
  • Thompson Reuters supports ORCID and recommends that authors obtain an ORCID in addition to a Researcher ID. See their page on Researcher ID & ORCID Integration.
Scopus Author Identifier From Elsevier Identifier automatically assigned to all authors indexed in Scopus
  • Articles indexed in Scopus only.
Google Scholar Citations From Google

From Google Scholar click My Citations and login to your Google account. After entering information into your profile Google will retrieve articles likely to be authored by you. Articles can then be added to your profile (in groups and/or individually.)
  • Items indexed by Google Scholar only.
Repository Identifier
arXiv Author IDs From arXiv

Used to accurately identify contributors to arXiv, an electronic archive of research articles in the sciences maintained by the Cornell University Library. arXiv authors opt-in to create an author ID on the create an author identifier page.
  • Currently links to articles indexed in arXiv only.
  • To see what services arXiv offers based on their identifiers see their author identifiers help page.

The above table on this page is licensed with a CC-BY License 2.0 from  MIT ORCID & author identifiers.

Have a question?

Profile Photo
Sandy DeGroote
Contact:
Professor & Scholarly Communications Librarian
312-413-9494