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Your name as an author is key to establishing a unique public profile for enhancing your research and for attribution purposes. Authors should use the same version of their name consistently throughout their academic and research careers.
How can authors find out if other authors have similar names? One tip is to do an author search in several databases such as PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus or Web of Science.
If you find similarities in author names, consider adding your full middle name or using your middle initial to distinguish it from other authors.
There are several resources to help authors manage unique and consistent author names to ensure that their publications are associated with the correct author.
We highly recommend that authors create an ORCID ID, and check their profiles in Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar. An ORCID ID can be created using publication data from Scopus or Web of Science/Researcher ID. Authors may also want to consider creating a LinkedIn or Doximity profile. WUSM physicians are highly encouraged to claim their Doximity profiles.
LinkedIn is a social/professional networking website for people in professional occupations, with privacy settings available. It is highly recommended that investigators or clinicians create a LinkedIn profile. Features of LinkedIn include:
Doximity is a professional networking site for U.S. physicians, medical students and clinically licensed healthcare professionals. As of 2022, at around 80% of physicians and 50% of NPs and PAs are verified members. Features of Doximity include:
WUSM physicians are strongly encouraged to claim their Doximity profiles. Why?
NCBI My Bibliography
The National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) advances science and health by providing access to biomedical and genomic information. Among the resources included are PubMed/MEDLINE, PubMed Central, genomic tools, registries, databases, among others. My NCBI is a dashboard that retains user information and database preferences to provide customized services for NCBI databases/resources. My Bibliography is one of the many tools offered via the My NCBI dashboard page. As of 2010, investigators/authors (funded by NIH or planning to seek funding) are required to use a My Bibliography account to manage their citations to publications and other research products. Citations to journal articles indexed by PubMed can be pulled into a My Bibliography collection and templates are available for all other publication types and research products.
Examples of citations to publications and other work products that can be included in My Bibliography are:
One of the features of My Bibliography is a URL link that allows for linking to the list of publications and research products noted in a My Bibliography collection. The link to the list of publications in a My Bibliography collection mirrors a list of results in PubMed and if users are affiliated with an institution that has a subscription to the journal or if the work is in PubMed Central, users can read the full text of the work. The collection is dynamically updated when investigators/authors (or their delegates) add new citations to their publications and other research products.
Authors are highly recommended to establish a Google Scholar profile.
Google Scholar allows authors to:
Set up your profile in Google Scholar
How to keep your Google Scholar Profile clean?
The NIH, AHRQ, and CDC have recently announced that individuals supported by research training, fellowship, research education, and career development awards will be required to have ORCID iDs beginning in FY 2020. Read the full notice here.
ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes authors from other authors and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between authors and their professional activities ensuring that their work is recognized.
ORCID is linked among other identifier systems such as the Scopus Author ID, ResearcherID and LinkedIn; publishers such as Nature and APS; and funding agencies such as NIH and the Wellcome Trust (see the SciENCV tab for more information about ORCID integration with NIH). This means that ORCID is not limited to a specific platform and is a non-proprietary means of establishing your author name.
Your name is key to establishing a unique public profile throughout your research and academic career for publications and research activities. But if your name is a common name or if you have changed your name, or if you are affiliated with several organizations over your career, there may be multiple name variants associated with your publications and research activities.
Registering for an ORCID identifier helps to promote discoverability among multiple information platforms and workflows as well as establishing a unique presence for researchers and scholars, regardless of name variants or affiliation history.
Registration for the ORCID iD is free and privacy settings are controlled by the individual. To register, complete a short registration form and select Register.
See the ORCID materials for more information:
The Delegate Feature
ORCID has a delegate feature available to help with managing ORCID accounts. "Trusted Individuals" can be added as delegates to an ORCID account to allow for editing and updating of an ORCID account and profile. Note that Trusted Individuals must register for an ORCID account.
More information:
For more information, see the ORCID Guide.
The Author Identifier Tool in Scopus allows users to locate a particular author by entering the author’s last name, full first name and a middle initial, as well as the current affiliation of the author. Results will return a main author name along with variants of the author's name that have been grouped into an author profile and associated publications for that author. The Scopus database addresses the issue of author ambiguation and reconciles authors who use different variations of their names throughout their careers. Authors are highly recommended to review their profile in Scopus to confirm the profile is correct, and set up alerts for their works.
Scopus is ORCID compliant allowing users to associate publications from their Scopus Author Profiles to ORCID profiles.
Importing Your Works from Scopus to ORCID
Users can use Scopus to populate the publication section of the ORCID profile. The Scopus to ORCID wizard helps you find the correct Scopus profile and confirm which publications are yours. You can then send the identifier and list of publications to the ORCID website. Any changes you make in the wizard will also be submitted to the Scopus Feedback team to correct your profile on Scopus.
NOTE:
For users that do not have access to the Scopus database, the Author Identifer Tool can be used by non-subscribers. Use the free Author Identifier Tool to search for an author name to reconcile name variants and/or affiliations and publications.
ResearcherID provides a solution to the author ambiguity problem within the scholarly research community. Each member is assigned a unique identifier to enable researchers to manage their publication lists, track their times cited counts and h-index, identify potential collaborators and avoid author variant issues. Privacy settings for the ResearcherID profile are controlled by the individual and authors are highly recommended to make their ResearcherID profile publicly available.
ResearcherID information is integrated with the Web of Science database and is ORCID compliant, allowing users to associate publications from Web of Science to ORCID profiles. ResearcherID is also integrated with Publons which is used to track your journal peer review and editing activities along with publications and citation metrics.
Registration for ResearcherID is free.
ResearcherID members are able to register and link to ORCID and Publons from their ResearcherID Profile.
