For many of us, sharing a common name with thousands of others might be an occasional inconvenience, or a source of frustration when Googling ourselves. But for researchers like U-M’s Jennifer Smith the implications are a little more serious.
Smith is an assistant research scientist in epidemiology at the School of Public Health, but in PubMed, a search engine with more than 24 million citations, there are 20,000 entries for J. Smith, and no clear way to distinguish one J. Smith from another.
More information
Thanks to a U-M Library initiative, soon all of the university’s researchers will have a unique identifier via membership in ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID), a non-profit organization working to reliably identify and link researchers with their work.
ORCID is supported by a community of academic institutions, funding agencies, publishers and others that have joined together to create a registry of unique scholar identification numbers.
It seeks to resolve authorship confusion in scholarly work, and to advance collaboration across disciplines, institutions and borders by minimizing the complexity of interactions and data entry across the increasing number of research information systems.
An ORCID identifier persists throughout a researcher’s career, regardless of job transitions or name changes, and can be attached to any research output — datasets, articles, books, grants, and more.
The library is in the process of creating ORCID ID numbers for all U-M researchers, beginning with those in the University Library, the School of Information and the U-M Transportation Research Institute. The ORCID numbers appear in MCommunity listings, in a new section labeled “Professional Information.”
