Research Impact

Why use an author ID?

Even if you don't have a common surname, author IDs help uniquely identify you and your publications. IDs ensure you aren't confused with another researcher with a similar name, and that citations aren't "lost" due to name misspellings (it happens more often than you think!).

Author IDs help promote you and your research: they provide an easy way for you, and scholars interested in your work, to see a complete list of works. Some author ID systems make it easy to generate citation counts and other metrics.

Author IDs also ensure your publications and citations are appropriate credited, even if you change names or move to another institution.

Which ID system should I use?

All of them! The various ID tools on left are not mutually exclusive, and some (ORCID and ResearcherID) have linkages to share information. 

We also suggest checking with other researchers: journals in your field may prefer a specific author ID system. In particular, applicants for NIH funding are encouraged to use SciENcv to create their NIH biosketch profiles.

Will my publication list and author information update automatically?

Generally, you have to add publications and update biographical information yourself. (Exception: Google Scholar has an option to automatically add new articles.) However,  most systems allow for searching and importing citations from existing article databases:

• ORCID: MLA Bibliography, Web of Science (via linked ResearcherID), CrossRef, Airiti (Chinese articles), BibTeX
• ResearcherID: Web of Science, EndNote, RIS, ORCID (via linked ORCID)
• SciENcv: PubMed
• Vitae: none (can upload documents to online dossier)
• Google Scholar Citations: Google Scholar

All ID tools also allow researchers to manually add citations by hand.

Can I generate citation counts with an ID tool?

Once you have added articles to your author profile, ResearcherID and Google Scholar Citations can generate citation counts (using Web of Science and Google Scholar, respectively).

ORCID cannot generate a citation count natively (within the ORCID system), but several third-party metric tools can import and track an ORCID publication list. (See our Citation Metrics page for more information.)

SciENcv and Vitae do not generate citation metrics.