Your research identity consists of a number of elements that together represent you as a researcher. These elements include:
Collating these elements in order to communicate your research identity to institutions, publications and funding bodies is key to your research career.
There are a variety of researcher ID management tools available to help you with this task, including ORCID, ResearcherID and Scopus Author Identifier.
Researcher profiles and IDs can be used to:
Reduce Author Ambiguity
Many authors have similar names. Author Identifiers distinguish between these names by assigning each author a unique number and grouping together all of the documents written by that author. This feature is especially useful for distinguishing between authors who share very common names.
Additionally, author names can be formatted differently. For example, the same author could appear in one document as Lewis, M; in another as Lewis, M.J; and in another as Lewis, Michael. Author Identifiers match the documents of this author and groups these name variants together so that authors, even if cited differently, are identified with their specific papers. This helps you find and recognize an author, despite variations in name spelling.
Manage Affiliation Changes
As you pursue opportunities at different institutions throughout your career, you can ensure that all of your research outputs are still attributed correctly to you and that your work can be found by others.
Improve Administrative Efficiency
Institutions, publishers and funders expect to be able to make use of authors' unique identifiers in their workflows, reducing the amount of repetitive biographical information required when you submit your CV or manuscripts for publication. For example, you can auto-populate details listed in your ORCID into ARC funding applications.
Improve Research Impact
Establishing a unique researcher identity is an important step to improving your research impact. An accurate and complete researcher profile will quickly and efficiently locate metrics such as citation counts and your h-index for all your publications. For more on research impact go to the UTAS guide to Research Impact.
Improve Networking and Collaboration
An accurate and active researcher profile assists networking by making it easier to find, and be found by, potential collaborators.
All University of Tasmania researchers, including staff and HDR candidates, are required to sign up to the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) Register and create a profile.
Navigate via the menu tabs to see instructions and guidance on using your ORCID.
In addition to creating your unique digital identifier in the ORCID Register, you may wish to integrate your ORCID with other profile services such as Google Scholar, Scopus Author ID or ResearcherID. Click on the tabs for each tool in the sidebar for more information on these services.
Ensure these profiles are all connected to UTAS via your WARP (see instructions below), or if you don't have a WARP page please let a Research Librarian know you have created these profiles.
This webinar gives an overview on developing and managing your researcher identity. It explains what research identity is and outlines the benefits of researcher identifiers. The focus of the session is on four key identifiers: ORCID, Google Scholar Citations, Scopus Author ID, and ResearcherID. It discusses how you can create and maintain the identifiers, shows examples and explains what is expected of UTAS researchers.
