Registering Researchers in Authority Files

Background

National name authority files are incomplete. Many researchers—tenured and non-tenured faculty and graduate students—are only partially represented in national name authority files. National name authority files cover poorly authors of journal articles and exclude researchers who do not publish but who create or contribute to data sets and other research activities. Uniquely identifying the academic authors of all publications, including journal articles, and researchers who do not publish, facilitates compiling individuals’ scholarly output, especially as their affiliations change over time. The scholarly output is a factor in the reputation and ranking of the scholar’s affiliated institution.

Impact

Our goal is to identify:

• the benefits, needs, and challenges for integrated author identification;
• approaches to effectively integrate multiple author identifier systems, and to reconcile information from multiple sources; and
• models, channels and workflows for registering and maintaining integrated author and researcher information.

The broader impact of this work will be to make it easier for researchers and institutions to more accurately measure their scholarly output.

Details

ORCID. Open Researcher & Contributor ID is an international, interdisciplinary not-for-profit organization seeking to solve name ambiguity in scholarly communications. ORCID aims to solve the name ambiguity problem in scholarly communications by creating a registry of persistent unique identifiers for individual researchers and an open and transparent linking mechanism between ORCID, other ID schemes, and research objects such as publications, grants, and patents. Participating in the ORCID Launch Partners Program are research institutions, publishers, research funders, data repositories, and third party providers, including The American Physical Society, Aries Systems, Avedas, Boston University, the California Institute of Technology, CrossRef, Elsevier, Faculty of 1000, figshare, Hindawi Publishing Corporation, KNODE, Nature Publishing Group, SafetyLit, Symplectic, Thomson Reuters, Total-Impact, and the Wellcome Trust.

ISNI. The International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) is an ISO standard (ISO 27729) that identifies public identities of parties—the identities used publicly by individuals or organizations involved in creating, producing, managing and distributing content. The ISNI system uniquely and authoritatively identifies public identities across multiple fields of creative activity.

VIAF is an international authority database. National libraries plus selected regional and trans-national library agencies contribute their authority files to the Virtual International Authority File (VIAF), which links together the authority data provided for a given entity.