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Unique Author Identifiers: About

What is a Unique Author Identifier?

Because people's names are not always unique, it can be difficult to distinguish between researchers in the same or different scientific fields.  To help with this problem, unique author identifiers can be assigned to help researchers distinguish themselves from other researchers with similar names. 

Problems Unique Author Identifiers Help Solve

  • Research works created by researchers with similar names can be incorrectly attributed to the wrong person.
  • A researcher's name can be expressed different ways making author searching difficult and necessitating multiple search terms.
  • A researcher's name can be changed to something completely different making tracking a researcher's work throughout their career difficult.

Common Features of Unique Author Identifier Systems

  • A profile providing information about the researcher such as field of research and institutional affiliation
  • A complete list of works collected together by either manually curating a list or through automated methods
  • Linking between systems allowing ease of connecting to the researcher's profile

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