eLife encourages authors to register with ORCID to finally, unambiguously link themselves to all their research activities and outputs
The scientific literature is growing and – with it – the confusion about who’s who. In his blog post, Benjamin Thompson poignantly demonstrates this in trying to find his own five published articles in a PubMed search, which yielded no less than 1,775 papers by scientists sharing the same last name.
ORCID is a non-profit, community-based effort to address this challenge by creating a registry of unique researcher identifiers so that research activities and outputs can be unambiguously linked to the individuals responsible.
Registration with ORCID takes 30 seconds and makes it possible to pull strands of information about institutional affiliations, published work, and funding together in one place. Once registered with ORCID, scientists will save precious hours as they work to publish, report on, and attract funding for their research.
ORCID has been adopted by a growing group of funding organisations (e.g. The Wellcome Trust and the US National Institutes of Health) and publishers (including the Nature Publishing Group, F1000, and Elsevier).
From the beginning, eLife has endeavoured to organise article-related data in ways that enhance discoverability and reporting. We are a member of ORCID and encourage all our editors and authors to register with ORCID and obtain their own unique ID, which will be displayed on articles published in eLife.
