Researcher IDs
Linking an external researcher identifier connects your profile to your existing published record. It is the main thing that lets work you published elsewhere be matched to you automatically, instead of you typing it in.
If you do only one thing here, link your ORCID.
Supported identifiers
| Identifier | Format | Example |
|---|---|---|
| ORCID | Four groups of four digits; the last character may be X | 0000-0002-1825-0097 |
| Scopus Author ID | 10 to 12 digits, no leading zero | 55664130700 |
| Web of Science ResearcherID | 1-3 letters, 4 digits, 4-digit year | AAA-1234-2019 |
Adding them
They live in your profile settings, under researcher identifiers. Paste either the bare identifier or the full profile URL – the URL is stripped and only the identifier is kept, so what you see after saving is what other services will match on.
Clear a field to remove an identifier.
Why a valid-looking ID can be rejected
Each identifier is checked before it is saved, and a value in the wrong shape is refused with a message describing the expected format.
ORCID goes further. Its last character is a check digit computed from the other
fifteen, so a single mistyped or transposed digit no longer adds up and is
rejected even though the ID looks perfectly well formed. If your ORCID is
refused, compare it against orcid.org character by
character rather than assuming the check is wrong. That check digit is also why
an ORCID can end in X – it stands for the value ten.
ORCID
ORCID is a persistent identifier for researchers, widely required by journals and funders. Registering is free at orcid.org/register.
It is the identifier worth having even if you have no others. Most external sources we match against carry ORCIDs, few carry the alternatives.
Scopus Author ID
Assigned automatically by Elsevier when your work is indexed in
Scopus – you do not register for one. Find yours by
searching your name on Scopus and opening your author profile; the ID is the
authorId in the URL.
Web of Science ResearcherID
Identifies authors within Web of Science.
Current IDs look like AAA-1234-2019, where the last four digits are the year
the profile was created. Older IDs issued before the Publons merge have a
single leading letter, such as B-9925-2009, and are still valid.
What linking does
Your identifiers appear on your public profile as links, so a reader can move between your profiles without guessing whether two similar names are the same person.
They are also how your works list gets populated. External sources – CrossRef, arXiv, ORCID, Semantic Scholar, PubMed – are matched against your identifiers and the results appear on your profile marked as imported. See Your profile for what the provenance markings mean.
Name-based matching, by contrast, is unreliable for common names and for anyone who has published under more than one form of theirs.
After linking
Check your works list. Automatic matching is good but not perfect, and it is easier to correct a wrong entry early than after it has been cited.