Many researchers share the same name, while others have different names during their career, or different variations of the same name. As part of your professional portfolio, you will be creating a researcher identity, to support networking and showcasing your research. Why is this important?
Why have an online presence? Things to think about:
An ORCiD is a unique identifier, which allows you to distinguish yourself from other researchers throughout your career. The unique identifier is publicly available and searchable in a public registry.
An ORCiD is of value at all career stages, from postgraduate research student to senior academic. Funders and publishers are increasingly adopting ORCiD as the method to unambiguously link people to their publications and grants.
ORCiD provides a persistent digital identifier (an ORCID iD) that you own and control, and that distinguishes you from every other researcher.
In Web of Science, researchers are assigned an individual ID called a WoS ResearcherID. Once a WoS ResearcherID is created, the publications affiliated to the researcher are added to their profile. Authors must register for an ID. (DePauw does not subscribe to Web of Science at this time.)
A Scopus Author ID (via Elsevier) distinguishes between authors with similar sounding names by assigning each author in Scopus a unique number under which all their research outputs are collated. Authors are automatically assigned an ID when they publish in a journal indexed by Scopus. (DePauw does not subscribe to Scopus at this time.)
A DOI, or Digital Object Identifier, is a string of numbers, letters and symbols used to permanently identify an article or document and link to it on the web. A DOI will help your reader easily locate a document from your citation. Think of it like a barcode for the article you’re citing — it will always refer to that article, and only that one. While a web address (URL) might change, the DOI will never change.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polymer.2014.02.020