ResearcherID

ResearcherID is an identifying system for scientific authors. The system was introduced in January 2008 by Thomson Reuters.

ResearcherID

ResearcherID logo
Available in	English
Owner	Clarivate Analytics
URL	publons.com/about/home/
Alexa rank	23,643 (Global, January 2019)
Registration	Optional
Launched	January, 2008
Current status	Active
Written in	English
OCLC number	926725318

This unique identifier aims at solving the problem of author identification and correct attribution of works. In scientific and academic literature it is common to cite name, surname, and initials of the authors of an article. Sometimes, however, there are authors with the same name, with the same initials, or the journal misspells names, resulting in several spellings for the same authors, and different authors with the same spelling.

Researchers can use ResearcherID to claim their published works and link their unique and persistent ResearcherID number to these works for correct attribution. In this way, they can also keep their publication list up to date and online.

The combined use of the Digital Object Identifier with the ResearcherID allows a unique association of authors and research articles. It can be used to link researchers with registered trials or identify colleagues and collaborators in the same field of research.[1]

In April 2019, ResearcherID was integrated with Publons, a Clarivate Analytics owned platform, where researchers can track their publications, peer reviewing activity, and journal editing work. With ResearcherID now hosted on Publons researchers can keep a more comprehensive view of their research output and contributions in one place. This is particularly important for researchers in fields that predominantly use peer-reviewed conference articles (computer science) or in fields that focus on publishing books and chapters in books (humanities and disciplines in the social sciences).

ResearcherID and Publons are also integrated with Web of Science, and ORCID, enabling data to be exchanged between these databases.[2]

ResearcherID has been criticized for being commercial and proprietary,[3] but also praised as "an initiative addressing the common problem of author misidentification".[4]