Have you ever tried to find a specific researcher’s scholarship through a database search? Chances are you have run into some challenges such as discovering multiple Researchers with the same name. One potential way to refine your search would be to limit the results to the Researcher’s Institution. But, what if the Researcher has held positions at multiple Institutions? Multiple search queries and further refinement would be necessary.

One solution to this difficulty of locating a specific Researcher is the use of an ORCID unique author identifier. By using a unique identifier for authors, searching for a specific researcher is straightforward and only requires knowing the author’s identifier. However, this will only work if the researcher has registered for an identifier such as ORCID (www.orcid.org).

Registering for an ORCID identifier is easy and free. Simply register, add your scholarship works, and then use your ORCID identifier. Your ORCID identifier can be used when submitting publications, applying for grants, and on your personal webpages.

The University of Alabama recently became ORCID Institutional members, and so we will have more information about ORCID soon.

However, a few points you may be interested in:

• Scientific and Engineering databases have already started to add Author Identifiers as a search option (e.g. Web of Science).
• Several publishers and grant agencies are now requiring an Author Identifier with submission.
• Importing your scholarship citations and other works into ORCID can be somewhat automated and painless. For example, I was able to export my citations from Google Scholar and then bulk import them into my ORCID Identifier profile.

Here is my ORCID identifier webpage for an example of how your ORCID identifier will appear to the public:

http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7363-531X

We encourage you to check out ORCID at www.orcid.org and get your own unique Author Identifier today!