All Researchers To Be Allocated Unique IDs

ananyo writes with information on a new scheme to help uniquely identify authors in the face of ambiguous names. From the article: "In 2011, Y. Wang was the world's most prolific author of scientific publications, with 3,926 to their name — a rate of more than 10 per day. Never heard of them? That's because they are a mixture of many different Y. Wangs, each indistinguishable in the scholarly record. The launch later this year of the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID), an identifier system that will distinguish between authors who share the same name, could soon solve the problem, allowing research papers to be associated correctly with their true author. Instead of filling out personal details on countless electronic forms associated with submitting papers or applying for grants, a researcher could also simply type in his or her ORCID number. Various fields would be completed automatically by pulling in data from other authorized sources, such as databases of papers, citations, grants and contact details. ORCID does not intend to offer such services itself; the idea is that other organizations will use the open-access ORCID database to build their own services."

16-digit ID

[Alomex]

I'm so glad they made the ID a fixed length 16-digit number. Experience shows that we are very good at predicting the total number of IDs ever to be needed.

Plus 54 bits should be more than enough, so no need to make the number extensible, thus wasting one precious bit as a field extension identifier.

public key

[ags1]

Can't we just sign docs with a private key? The public key's finger print can be your unique id. Or are we still attached to paper?

Re:16-digit ID

[Kenja]

Dont worry. The number of researchers, scientists and engineers is going down, not up.

Re:Problem?

[JaredOfEuropa]

I have a last name that is very uncommon in the Netherlands, even more so because it is capitalized differently than usual, and it is "misspelled" to boot. Even so, there's a guy (not family) who shares my first and last name, went to the same university, same department, and graduated on a topic similar to mine. We've published on overlapping topics. So yes, confusion does happen, and I've often been contacted by someone looking for the other guy. Sounds nice since I have just four publications to my name whereas he went into research and has many more, but of course I can't take credit...

Re:Unique IDs eh?

[jdgeorge]

Why not solve this problem by just using the full name?

Because it wouldn't solve the problem at all. There are many researchers with the exact same full name. One reason we have Social Security numbers in the US is because full names have a strong tendency to be similar.

That said, I'm sure the Wangs can come up with a solution. huh-huh...

Re:Problem?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

I am sure it happens, but (a) it seems unlikely that they would be in the same field

I have a few name collisions just in my own reference database (i.e., list of papers to which I've referred in my own work.) I can pretty much guarantee that if you look at the author lists for any major single-subject journal, you'll find a whole bunch of identical $FIRST_INITIAL $LAST_NAME entries which are not, in fact, the same people.

Hell, I have a pretty rare (in the US, at least) last name -- and occasionally I still get e-mails from people who think I'm the Daniel Dvorkin who wrote a paper on psoriasis in 1989. It's not entirely unreasonable, since my name appears on a couple of papers related to inflammatory disease, but I'm a grad student in Colorado, not a dermatologist in Pennsylvania ...

and (b) it seems even less likely that they would be at the same institution and (c) even less likely that their contact information would be the same so are there really cases where there is confusion over who wrote a paper

True enough, but people who are looking at author names are not necessarily looking at the entire paper (where contact information is usually given.) A related problem is that journal publications are increasingly subject to various kinds of text data mining, and rightly or wrongly, the format for fields like author institution and contact information isn't standardized from journal to journal -- and in academia, both institutions and e-mail addresses are subject to frequent change. If you published a paper five years ago while at the University of East Dakota and your e-mail in the corresponding author field was given as [e-mail], and you're now at South Virginia State with the address [e-mail], good luck getting any database to make that connection without human assistance.

Re:Unique IDs eh?

[mikael]

Is it any different from an Email address or a bank account number?

If you have gone to the effort to research, write and publish a paper the last thing you want is for people not to know who or where you are.

To make it really useful, you should be able to register as an independent researcher and take it with you wherever you go.

The only downside is thst it might become like the Chinese record of achievement.