Researcher identifiers

As scholarly publishing increases, an increasing number of researchers share the same last name and single initial with other authors. This hinders the discovery of research in scholarly databases and can result in publications being incorrectly attributed to contributors with the same name. To tackle the problem of name ambiguity, a number of organisations and publishers have developed a system of unique research identifiers.

The ARC and NHMRC encourage all researchers to use the ORCID system of identifiers.

Learn more about ORCID and its use at La Trobe here

Each author indexed in the Scopus citation database has an automatically generated author identifier that helps with finding authors with common last names or variations in spelling. It also enables the matching of authors with their papers and citation metrics, regardless of how they are cited in the database.

It is worth checking to see if you have multiple author profiles in Scopus as this can occur when an author is published under name variants or different institutional affiliations.  

Please see the Scopus page Search for an author and view their profile and scroll down the page for a video of the steps required to search for your name in Scopus. Searching for an author is the first 55 second of the video, and the search results screen will show whether you have more than one Scopus author profile. The rest of the video is also useful for checking your publications and understanding the Scopus author profile.

If you search for your author profile, and discover that you have more than one Scopus ID, or that your ID is missing publications, please see the Scopus page How to make corrections to your author profile and scroll down the page for a video of how to make corrections to our Scopus profile.

Multiple profiles or other errors in your Scopus profile can be corrected by contacting Scopus, or contact the Library Research Liaison team.

ResearcherID is a free profile and name identifier service that is integrated with the Web of Science™ and managed by Publons. Recently Publons ResearcherID functionality moved to Web of Science and you can now manage your ResearcherID directly from the Web of Science platform. When you register you receive a unique identifier. This helps to clarify author names and citations and improve information searches.

You can use ResearcherID to:

• View profiles and find potential collaborators
• Build a publication list from Web of Science™ search services and your Endnote library.
• View citation metrics
• Maintain profile information

Please see the Clarivate Authors/Researchers: Build your profile page for information and step by step instructions and short videos of each step on how to create your ResearcherID and claim your profile in Web of Science.