2016 Charleston Library Conference

This session will provide an overview of the role of author identifiers in scholarly communication, with a particular focus on ORCID and ResearcherID. Author identifiers help  solve the name disambiguation problem by providing researchers with a unique identifier that they can connect with their scholarly output, and use when submitting or creating future scholarly work. As an open identifier, ORCID is now embedded in hundreds of systems across all researcher workflows - funding, publishing, research institutions, scholarly associations, and more. ResearcherID, developed by Thomson Reuters (now Clarivate Analytics), is a proprietary author identifier that enables researchers to manage their publication lists, track their times cited counts and h-index, identify potential collaborators and avoid author misidentification; it’s also integrated with Web of Science and is ORCID compliant. After a brief overview of identifiers in the research infrastructure, there will be a short introduction to ORCID and ResearcherID, followed by strategies for librarians at colleges and research universities to encourage the use of author identifiers including ORCID and ResearcherID. The presentations will be followed by a panel discussion of key opportunities and challenges, learning points and successes, including a mix of pre-prepared and audience questions.