LibGuides: Research Impact: Author Identifiers

Introduction

Do you have a common name and struggle to find all the publications in citation index databases like Web of Science and Scopus? Setting up/maintaining your author profiles for these citation databases can go a long way in helping you save time and effort from having to search high and low for all your publications in these databases.

NTU Library can guide you to create/maintain your researcher profiles optimally for various uses such as for your research grant applications, promotion and tenure exercise (P&T) exercise, contract renewals, promoting of your research visibility and research activities in NTU. Feel free to contact us via library@ntu.edu.sg if you need help with these researcher profiles.

Here are the benefits of maintaining your researcher profiles:

It takes literally just a few mouse clicks to get your latest citation counts anytime with well-maintained researcher profiles
You might miss out publications in Web of Science and in Scopus if you only do name searches (e.g. name variant issues, indexing errors in the databases)
If you have a common name, a name search to obtain your publications and citations will be difficult as filtering of search results is tedious

Author Identifiers - Distinguish Yourself

Author identifiers are useful to help with author name disambiguation. In order to measure your impact as an author, you want to be sure you get credit for all your research output. By having an author identifier, it will help to connect your research outputs which you could have published under variations of your name, or different institutions, to you, instead of your work being incorrectly associated with another author.

Commonly Used Researcher IDs

ORCID

ORCID is a unique and persistent digital identifier which allows you to distinguish yourself from other researchers, specifically those who have the same names or initials as you. Unlike Web of Science and Scopus, ORCID profile is not tied to a particular citation index database. ORCID can be synchronised with Web of Science and Scopus to update your profile automatically.

For more information on how to register, authorise NTU and to optimise your ORCID record, see this link.

Web of Science Researcher Profile (ResearcherID)

Web of Science Researcher Profiles allow researchers to track and showcase their publications, editorial records and peer review contributions. Publons profiles were moved into Web of Science Researcher Profiles in August 2022. Publons and Web of Science account holders will be able to log in to their Web of Science Researcher Profiles using their Publons/Web of Science login credentials.

Non-account holders are recommended to register for an account and then populate their newly created Web of Science Researcher Profile with their publications.

Scopus Author ID

Scopus assigns each author with a unique Author Identifier (Author ID) and automatically groups publications by the same author under the Author ID. This automatic population comes with its pros and cons as duplicates of author IDs can occur (e.g. change of affiliations by researchers over time, researchers using different name variants for different publications).

Google Scholar Profile

Authors can create their own Google Scholar Profile, a free service provided by Google. Once you have created your Profile, you can populate the Profile with publications. You can check who is citing your articles, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics. You can make your profile public, so that it may appear in Google Scholar results when people search for your name, e.g., Richard Feynman.