ResearcherID

Last updated

ResearcherID
Researcherid logo.png
ResearcherID logo
Available inEnglish
Owner Clarivate Analytics
URL publons.com/about/home/
RegistrationOptional
LaunchedJanuary 2008
Current statusActive
Written inEnglish
OCLC  number 926725318

ResearcherID is an identifying system for scientific authors. The system was introduced in January 2008 by Thomson Reuters Corporation.

Contents

This unique identifier aims at solving the problem of author identification and correct attribution of works. In scientific and academic literature, it is common to cite the name, surname, and initials of the authors of an article. However, there are sometimes authors with the same name, initials; or the journal may misspell names, resulting in several spellings for the same authors, and different authors with the same spelling.

Researchers can use ResearcherID to claim their published works and link their unique and persistent ResearcherID number to these works for correct attribution. In this way, they can also keep their publication list up to date and online.

The combined use of the Digital Object Identifier with the ResearcherID allows a unique association of authors and research articles. It can be used to link researchers with registered trials or identify colleagues and collaborators in the same field of research. [1]

In April 2019, ResearcherID was integrated with Publons, [2] a Clarivate Analytics owned platform, where researchers can track their publications, peer reviewing activity, and journal editing work. With ResearcherID now hosted on Publons researchers can keep a more comprehensive view of their research output and contributions in one place. This is particularly important for researchers in fields that predominantly use peer-reviewed conference articles (computer science) or in fields that focus on publishing books and chapters in books (humanities and disciplines in the social sciences).

ResearcherID and Publons are also integrated with Web of Science and ORCID, enabling data to be exchanged between these databases. [3]

ResearcherID has been criticized for being commercial and proprietary, [4] but also praised as "an initiative addressing the common problem of author misidentification". [5]

Overview

As the ongoing globalization of the science and technologies continues, enlarging groups of scientific researchers have stepped into various different fields to study. The dilemmas they are continuously facing include not being able to directly link the author with respective literature, not being up to date with specific topics within the field, etc." biomedical researchers do not possess the capacity to automatically distinguish between two researchers who happen to share the same, or similar, names”. [6]

Therefore, unique identifiers for authors were introduced, which have been developing since the end of last century.

ResearcherID, as one of the author identification systems, aiming to offer digital identity to each author and to build closer connections between researchers around the world. First started in 2008 by Thomson Reuters and Elsevier, who were both bibliographic database providers, ResearcherID helped researchers to create comprehensive profiles, containing research fields, key words, published literature, and connections to other researchers in the same research field. [7]

From April 2022, Publons started to move the profiles into the Web of Science so as to avoid data inconsistencies between the two platforms. [8]

Development

In 2008, Thomson Reuters started up the ResearcherID system as an addition of Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science (WoS) database. [9] Researchers were benefited from the system on inter-connection between authors and literatures. Each researcher could list personal publishes in the profiles for others’ references. Scholars were also able to find references through searching the researcherID, name of the author or the literature itself. Links under names were created for more direct searches. Meanwhile, creating personal profiles helped others distinguish researchers with the same first and last names, therefore increasing clarification of worldwide scientific progress.

Later, ResearcherID was recommended to relate to Digital Object Identifier (DOI), as to enhance relationships between various researchers, creating larger maps connecting authors in the same research field. Though researchers might work in different fields, it became easier to associate authors with key terms and topics.

The Web of Knowledge platform was connected to ResearcherID in 2011, compensating manual mistakes between profiles and literature. [10] Due to a vast development of unique identifiers in the research field, there has been numbers of systems serving identification process, for example, ORCID, Scopus, ResearcherID and ResearchGate. [6] Missing literature or informational mistakes were frequently shown when one researcher uploaded several profiles on different platforms. Thus, this combination enhanced the reliability of profiles on each platform, and provided a more thorough knowledge to a particular researcher.

In the year 2012, Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) was integrated with ResearcherID to share and verify information in both systems, improving the efficiency of independent retrieval.

In 2019, ResearcherID was binded with Publons which was a platform for field workers to make appraisals and authentication on researchers, thus enhancing the general contribution of certain literature among the field and global process on certain subjects. Nowadays, ResearcherID is still actively used by amounts of authors and researchers.

Identifiers

ResearcherID, as a self-registered identifier, will be provided whenever a researcher finishes registration in the ResearcherID database. The identifier was the combination of alphabets and numbers, with the last four numbers representing the year registered, for example: Z-0000-2022. [7] By searching either the name of the author or ResearcherID on the Web of Science ResearcherID website, users can find the author’s present occupation, his or her publications, key words of research fields, main topics of published literature and direct links to information page of the most cited publications, though full text cannot be uploaded. [11] The ORCID link is also listed on the same page as a connection between two systems.

The ResearcherID’s registration will be completed at www.researcherid.com, which is set up on the Web of Knowledge database. Researchers will be asked whether to create the ORCID number or not when completing the registration, in order to transfer data from ResearcherID to ORCID database. [12] ResearcherID accounts can be used to login the Web of Science and Endnote. This enables researchers to arrange their own literature in different profiling systems and track their publications at any time.

Due to the integration of ORCID number and ResearcherID, the Web of Science Core Collection assign them to the Author Identifiers index, enabling researchers to get access to numbers of profiles and publications.

Web of Science Core Collection: Web of Science mainly serves as a citation/abstract database, for full texts cannot be uploaded onto the platform. Users are able to search and analyze any publications as well as their citations and references. Choosing Web of Science Core Collection enables researchers to search literature among the abstract databases.

Uses

Having a unique ResearcherID can:

Integration and Distinction

ResearcherID and ORCID

The combination of ResearcherID and ORCID helps information transfer between two platforms, for example: main research areas, published literature, etc. Through this exchange of information, it can reduce chances of researchers' manual mistakes on profiling. Yet, Researchers cannot directly edit their profiles in the ResearcherID database. If the edition have occurred in other profiles, ORCID platform will automatically change the old information in its database. In addition, ORCID is known for its non-profittable feature. Thus, comparing to ORCID, ResearcherID is sometimes judged as profitable and proprietary, being not open completely to every researcher. [9] Moreover, ResearcherID will accept any literature published under the Web of Science Group products, which means, to some extent, it needs more process before a non WoS-registered researcher to publish the study on this platform. [11] In comparison, ORCID has a larger group of users for it accepts various sources of publication without filtering in advance.

Due to the fact that ResearcherID is proprietary and ORCID is non-proprietary, ORCID has developed to be more community driven than ResearcherID. [9] [15] More authors tend not to use ResearcherID to avoid the connection between researchers and commercial profit. Particularly, journals, books, patents etc., have compulsory regulations for authors’ registration in ORCID instead of ResearcherID. In conclusion, ResearcherID plays a more supplementary role among author identifiers, but is more necessary in the Web of Science Groups of products.

Nevertheless, both ResearcherID and ORCID have various user populations, and it has benefits to have both. [16] For ResearcherID, authors primarily distribute among Physical Science, Social Science, Arts and Humanities. [15] ORCID has the largest group in Health Science, but due to its non-profitable features, ORCID accepts more content types, and thus it also has sufficient population in other science disciplines. Nevertheless, neither researcherID nor ORCID focuses on the mathematics field. Instead, arXiv ID mainly serves in the discipline of Mathematics.

ResearcherID and Scopus

Scopus' users spread across most disciplines included in health science and other non-mathematics areas. [15] There are also a relative number of authors in the field of science, technology, arts and humanities. [17] Though the Web of Science does not have as many citations as Scopus does, the searching results therefore become more accurate compared with Scopus. Yet, data inconsistencies still exist in the Web of Science. For example, the spelling of the authors’ surname and given name, authors' names not corresponding to the correct paper, etc. [14]

ResearcherID and Google Scholar

Google Scholar, like ResearcherID, is also a widely accepted profiling site. However, ResearcherID provides a list of bibliographic information based on authors and publications, while Google Scholar contains full papers, links to multiple accesses, authors, etc. On the other hand, the Web of Science is able to associate Google Scholar with other solutions, for example, Endnote. [18] In other words, Google Scholar covers a larger range of research studies, yet have included bibliographic problems, for example, author sequence, different paper title, etc. ResearcherID has a relatively smaller coverage but is more accurate than Google Scholar. [14]

Inadequacy

ResearcherID was proved to have less users compared with other author identifiers. As a result of an investigation in 2020, there were 172689 profiles in ResearcherID platform, which was less than the 657319 on Scopus database, and 513236 on ResearchGate. [11] ResearcherID was highly recommended for usage, but was not selected frequently because it was not automatically coded. On the other hand, ORCID code was more widely accepted by international journals and publishers than ResearcherID and was somehow mandatory for publications. The Scopus author ID was another researcher identifier which allocate a code directly to any author in the system. [19] Therefore, it is encouraged that ResearcherID to realize automatic registration. [20]

Though researchers tend to choose ResearchID for identification less, this system can be used to prove the author sets, especially after having combined with other identifiers. On one hand, ResearcherID can transfer files into RIS form which is specifically established for research information system. [9] The form includes all necessary messages for a certain literature, including its publisher, publishing date, book name, etc. In other words, the transformation will consolidate the information on ResearcherID into a more systematic form, helping both scholars and non-scholars reach the information they are looking for. On the other hand, through using ResearcherID on the Publons platform, users can find the exact researcher, as well as his or her academic collaborators. As an interactive lab environment, researcherID makes it easier to reference literature for the research field and global use.

There are also problems with registration. Since authors complete their registration through self-identification, it becomes easier to have wrong or missing data. For example, the information of authors' geographic addresses is found to be missing in numbers of profiles among the disciplines of social science, arts and humanities. The missing information may slow the research process, for the users cannot compare specific authors with other researchers in the same region, states, countries, or continent. [21] This reduces the connection between individual authors and other institutions as well. Meanwhile, it may be misleading for external users while using the Web of Science. The Information can be assigned into different categories, and result in polarized judgements towards the authors and their literature.

While the issue of self-identification registration has been addressed, it is not all of the citations uploaded on the Web of Science that are counted towards the citation metrics, which affects the accuracy and reliability of this bibliographic networking platform. These citation metrics are suggested to represent the overall performance of the literature and its influence in relevant disciplines. The eventual data and analyses may vary when the authors' information is missing or not all papers are included. [22] In addition, there have been a number of empty profiles on the Web of Science with unclear reasons, and yet still are counted in statistics. It is suggested that certain options should be conducted towards these profiles, so as to improve the quality of the networking sites. [18]

See also

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Citation</span> Reference to a source

A citation is a reference to a source. More precisely, a citation is an abbreviated alphanumeric expression embedded in the body of an intellectual work that denotes an entry in the bibliographic references section of the work for the purpose of acknowledging the relevance of the works of others to the topic of discussion at the spot where the citation appears.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Citation index</span> Index of citations between publications

A citation index is a kind of bibliographic index, an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which later documents cite which earlier documents. A form of citation index is first found in 12th-century Hebrew religious literature. Legal citation indexes are found in the 18th century and were made popular by citators such as Shepard's Citations (1873). In 1961, Eugene Garfield's Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) introduced the first citation index for papers published in academic journals, first the Science Citation Index (SCI), and later the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) and the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (AHCI). American Chemical Society converted its printed Chemical Abstract Service into internet-accessible SciFinder in 2008. The first automated citation indexing was done by CiteSeer in 1997 and was patented. Other sources for such data include Google Scholar, Microsoft Academic, Elsevier's Scopus, and the National Institutes of Health's iCite.

Scopus is a scientific abstract and citation database, launched by the academic publisher Elsevier as a competitor to older Web of Science in 2004. An ensuing competition between the two databases has been characterized as "intense" and is considered to significantly benefit their users in terms of continuous improvent in coverage, search/analysis capabilities, but not in price. Free database The Lens completes the triad of main universal academic research databases.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bibliometrics</span> Statistical analysis of written publications

Bibliometrics is the application of statistical methods to the study of bibliographic data, especially in scientific and library and information science contexts, and is closely associated with scientometrics to the point that both fields largely overlap.

Scientometrics is a subfield of informetrics that studies quantitative aspects of scholarly literature. Major research issues include the measurement of the impact of research papers and academic journals, the understanding of scientific citations, and the use of such measurements in policy and management contexts. In practice there is a significant overlap between scientometrics and other scientific fields such as information systems, information science, science of science policy, sociology of science, and metascience. Critics have argued that overreliance on scientometrics has created a system of perverse incentives, producing a publish or perish environment that leads to low-quality research.

Citation analysis is the examination of the frequency, patterns, and graphs of citations in documents. It uses the directed graph of citations — links from one document to another document — to reveal properties of the documents. A typical aim would be to identify the most important documents in a collection. A classic example is that of the citations between academic articles and books. For another example, judges of law support their judgements by referring back to judgements made in earlier cases. An additional example is provided by patents which contain prior art, citation of earlier patents relevant to the current claim. The digitization of patent data and increasing computing power have led to a community of practice that uses these citation data to measure innovation attributes, trace knowledge flows, and map innovation networks.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Google Scholar</span> Academic search service by Google

Google Scholar is a freely accessible web search engine that indexes the full text or metadata of scholarly literature across an array of publishing formats and disciplines. Released in beta in November 2004, the Google Scholar index includes peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Informetrics</span> Study of the quantitative aspects of information

Informetrics is the study of quantitative aspects of information, it is an extension and evolution of traditional bibliometrics and scientometrics. Informetrics uses bibliometrics and scientometrics methods to study mainly the problems of literature information management and evaluation of science and technology. Informetrics is an independent discipline that uses quantitative methods from mathematics and statistics to study the process, phenomena, and law of informetrics. Informetrics has gained more attention as it is a common scientific method for academic evaluation, research hotspots in discipline, and trend analysis.

ScienceDirect is a searcheable web-based bibliographic database, which provides access to full texts of scientific and medical publications of the Dutch publisher Elsevier as well of several small academic publishers. It hosts over 18 million publons from more than 4,000 academic journals and 30,000 e-books. The access to the full-text requires subscription, while the bibliographic metadata are free to read. ScienceDirect was launched by Elsevier in March 1997.

The h-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The h-index correlates with success indicators such as winning the Nobel Prize, being accepted for research fellowships and holding positions at top universities. The index is based on the set of the scientist's most cited papers and the number of citations that they have received in other publications. The index has more recently been applied to the productivity and impact of a scholarly journal as well as a group of scientists, such as a department or university or country. The index was suggested in 2005 by Jorge E. Hirsch, a physicist at UC San Diego, as a tool for determining theoretical physicists' relative quality and is sometimes called the Hirsch index or Hirsch number.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Web of Science</span> Online subscription index of citations

The Web of Science is a paid-access platform that provides access to multiple databases that provide reference and citation data from academic journals, conference proceedings, and other documents in various academic disciplines.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">International Standard Name Identifier</span> 16 digit identifier for people and organisations

The International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) is an identifier system for uniquely identifying the public identities of contributors to media content such as books, television programmes, and newspaper articles. Such an identifier consists of 16 digits. It can optionally be displayed as divided into four blocks.

In the Dutch research system, the Digital Author Identifier (DAI) system assigns a unique number to all academic authors as a form of authority control. The DAI links the PICA database in institutional libraries with the METIS national research information system.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">ORCID</span> Code to uniquely identify scientific and other academic authors

The ORCID is a nonproprietary alphanumeric code to uniquely identify authors and contributors of scholarly communication as well as ORCID's website and services to look up authors and their bibliographic output.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Altmetrics</span> Alternative metrics for analyzing scholarship

In scholarly and scientific publishing, altmetrics are non-traditional bibliometrics proposed as an alternative or complement to more traditional citation impact metrics, such as impact factor and h-index. The term altmetrics was proposed in 2010, as a generalization of article level metrics, and has its roots in the #altmetrics hashtag. Although altmetrics are often thought of as metrics about articles, they can be applied to people, journals, books, data sets, presentations, videos, source code repositories, web pages, etc.

Semantic Scholar is a research tool for scientific literature powered by artificial intelligence. It is developed at the Allen Institute for AI and was publicly released in November 2015. Semantic Scholar uses modern techniques in natural language processing to support the research process, for example by providing automatically generated summaries of scholarly papers. The Semantic Scholar team is actively researching the use of artificial intelligence in natural language processing, machine learning, human–computer interaction, and information retrieval.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Microsoft Academic</span> Online bibliographic database

Microsoft Academic was a free internet-based academic search engine for academic publications and literature, developed by Microsoft Research in 2016 as a successor of Microsoft Academic Search. Microsoft Academic was shut down in 2022. Both OpenAlex and The Lens claim to be successors to Microsoft Academic.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">State Scientific and Technical Library of Ukraine</span>

The State Scientific and Technical Library of Ukraine, SSTL is the main academic library of Ukraine and is part of the system of scientific and technical information of the Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine. The purpose of the State Scientific and Technical Library of Ukraine activity is to promote the implementation of state policy in the field of education, science and culture, and to ensure the access of scientists, specialists, and citizens to sources of scientific and technical information.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Clarivate</span> American analytics company

Clarivate Plc is a British-American publicly traded analytics company that operates a collection of subscription-based services, in the areas of bibliometrics and scientometrics; business / market intelligence, and competitive profiling for pharmacy and biotech, patents, and regulatory compliance; trademark protection, and domain and brand protection. In the academy and the scientific community, Clarivate is known for being the company that calculates the impact factor, using data from its Web of Science product family, that also includes services/applications such as Publons, EndNote, EndNote Click, and ScholarOne. Its other product families are Cortellis, DRG, CPA Global, Derwent, CompuMark, and Darts-ip, and also the various ProQuest products and services.

References

  1. ↑ Enserink, Martin (27 March 2009). "SCIENTIFIC PUBLISHING: Are You Ready to Become a Number?". Science . 323 (5922): 1662–1664. Bibcode:2009Sci...323.1662E. doi:10.1126/science.323.5922.1662. PMID   19325094. S2CID   206584787.
  2. ↑ "Your ResearcherID of Web of Science moved to Publons". Wageningen University & Research . 24 April 2019. Retrieved 6 December 2021.
  3. ↑ "RID – ORCID Integration – IP & Science – Thomson Reuters" . Retrieved 29 March 2013.
  4. ↑ Wolinsky, Howard (2008). "What's in a name?". EMBO Reports. 9 (12): 1171–1174. doi:10.1038/embor.2008.217. PMC   2603453 . PMID   19047988.
  5. ↑ Cals, Jochen WL; Daniel Kotz (28 June 2008). "Researcher identification: the right needle in the haystack". The Lancet . 371 (9631): 2152–2153. doi:10.1016/S0140-6736(08)60931-9. ISSN   0140-6736. PMID   18586158. S2CID   44820419.
  6. 1 2 Harrison, Andrew Marc; Harrison, Anthony Mark (1 October 2016). "Necessary but not sufficient: unique author identifiers". BMJ Innovations. 2 (4): 141–143. doi:10.1136/bmjinnov-2016-000135. ISSN   2055-8074. PMC   5451540 . PMID   28616253.
  7. 1 2 Cujba, Rodica (22 November 2019). "THE ROLE OF PERSISTENT IDENTIFIERS IN E-SCIENCE". Journal of Social Sciences. II (4): 40–46. doi:10.5281/zenodo.3550705.
  8. ↑ Publons (14 March 2022). "Your Publons™ profile is moving to the Web of Science™".
  9. 1 2 3 4 Mazov, N. A.; Gureev, V. N. (1 July 2014). "The role of unique identifiers in bibliographic information systems". Scientific and Technical Information Processing. 41 (3): 206–210. doi:10.3103/S0147688214030101. ISSN   1934-8118. S2CID   14234900.
  10. ↑ Rotenberg, Ellen; Kushmerick, Ann (1 August 2011). "The Author Challenge: Identification of Self in the Scholarly Literature". Cataloging & Classification Quarterly. 49 (6): 503–520. doi:10.1080/01639374.2011.606405. ISSN   0163-9374. S2CID   62677619.
  11. 1 2 3 Boudry, Christophe; Durand-Barthez, Manuel (2 September 2020). "Use of author identifier services (ORCID, ResearcherID) and academic social networks (Academia.edu, ResearchGate) by the researchers of the University of Caen Normandy (France): A case study". PLOS ONE. 15 (9): e0238583. Bibcode:2020PLoSO..1538583B. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0238583 . ISSN   1932-6203. PMC   7467223 . PMID   32877458.
  12. ↑ ResearcherID. "Welcome to the new Web of Science ResearcherID".
  13. 1 2 Clarivate. "Web of Science Core Collection".
  14. 1 2 3 4 Jacso, Peter (1 February 2018). "The scientometric portrait of Eugene Garfield through the free ResearcherID service from the Web of Science Core Collection of 67 million master records and 1.3 billion references". Scientometrics. 114 (2): 545–555. doi:10.1007/s11192-017-2624-3. ISSN   1588-2861. S2CID   3302540.
  15. 1 2 3 Tran, Clara Y.; Lyon, Jennifer A. (26 April 2017). "Faculty Use of Author Identifiers and Researcher Networking Tools". College & Research Libraries. doi: 10.5860/crl.78.2.171 .
  16. ↑ Editage Insights (29 May 2017). "What is the advantage of having both ORCiD and ResearcherID?".
  17. ↑ Mering, Margaret (2 October 2017). "Correctly Linking Researchers to Their Journal Articles: An Overview of Unique Author Identifiers". Serials Review. 43 (3–4): 265–267. doi:10.1080/00987913.2017.1386056. ISSN   0098-7913. S2CID   67705659.
  18. 1 2 Martín-Martín, Alberto; Orduna-Malea, Enrique; Delgado López-Cózar, Emilio (4 March 2016). "The Role of Ego in Academic Profile Services: Comparing Google Scholar, ResearchGate, Mendeley, and ResearcherID". SSRN. SSRN   2745892.
  19. ↑ Aman, Valeria (1 November 2018). "Does the Scopus author ID suffice to track scientific international mobility? A case study based on Leibniz laureates". Scientometrics. 117 (2): 705–720. doi:10.1007/s11192-018-2895-3. ISSN   1588-2861. S2CID   52270328.
  20. ↑ Sebo, Paul; de Lucia, Sylvain; Vernaz, Nathalie (1 May 2021). "Accuracy of PubMed-based author lists of publications and use of author identifiers to address author name ambiguity: a cross-sectional study". Scientometrics. 126 (5): 4121–4135. doi: 10.1007/s11192-020-03845-3 . ISSN   1588-2861. S2CID   233450773.
  21. ↑ Liu, Weishu; Hu, Guangyuan; Tang, Li (1 August 2018). "Missing author address information in Web of Science—An explorative study". Journal of Informetrics. 12 (3): 985–997. arXiv: 1807.09944 . doi:10.1016/j.joi.2018.07.008. ISSN   1751-1577. S2CID   51724105.
  22. ↑ Martin-Martin, Alberto; Orduna-Malea, Enrique; Ayllon, Juan M.; Lopez-Cozar, Emilio Delgado (7 February 2016). "The counting house: measuring those who count. Presence of Bibliometrics, Scientometrics, Informetrics, Webometrics and Altmetrics in the Google Scholar Citations, ResearcherID, ResearchGate, Mendeley & Twitter". arXiv: 1602.02412 .
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.