iMechanica - ResearcherID, a unique identifier of a researcher - Comments

Scopus IDs

MichelleLOyen — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 16:11:10 -0400

I made the point previously that this ID in Scopus in incomplete for me. If I search for "Oyen M" and then check box the names that are actually really me, there are six boxes to check and a total of 46 publications. The Author ID is thus only catching 2/3 of my work and there does not seem to be any mechanism for feeding that information back to Scopus, at least not that I could find.

Author ID on Scopus

Zhigang Suo — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 08:44:04 -0400

Dear Jeroen: Thank you for the input. Does Scopus provide a URL of the ID of an author, so that the author can place the URL on his own homepage, for example?

Hi all, here in

jeroen bosman — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 08:28:10 -0400

Hi all,

here in utrecht (The Netherlands) we subscribe to both Scopus and Web of Science. Scopus indeed seems to have broader coverage in the technical sciences, as it includes the full Compendex database. We also did a comparison of copus, Web of science and Google Scholar.

For over two years now Scopus has had author identification, with unique ID's for each researcher. The system automatically groups name variants and shows a profile of each researcher included the metrics (H-index etc.). It assigns the articles based on author name, subject area, affiliation history and citation paptterns. Of course some article are left unassigned and very very rarely an article will be wrongly assigned. That's why authors can give feedback and suggest grouping or ungrouping of articles and author name variants.

E.g. the author ID of Michelle Oyen is 6602216219 (30 grouped articles), that of John W. Hutchinson is 7402097869 (223 grouped articles). It is nice that Scopus attempts this, although user feedback will prove essential to get all articles correctly assigned. It will be interesting to see how these two systems of author ID's develop.

Yeah

Yan Yang — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 02:12:06 -0400

I'v got one. Thomsonscientific is well done.

id

zhan-sheng guo — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 20:02:48 -0400

thank you very much.

i have got it and update in my profile

Re: Scopus

MichelleLOyen — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 13:39:17 -0400

I find the Scopus interface far easier to use and much more intuitive but I do not yet know of a service similar to ResearcherID (although one could exist and I might not know about it!). Hopefully they're listening!

Re: ISI and RID v Scopus

Teng Li — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:37:39 -0400

I found the similar comparison as Michelle did. In my case, the number of citation times provided by Scopus is about 30% higher than that by ISI. Scopus does search more databases than ISI, based on my limited use of Scopus.

Re: ISI and RID v Scopus

Zhigang Suo — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 09:39:37 -0400

Dear Michelle: I have never really used Scopus myself, but heard good things about it. Does Scopus also offer a service like ResearcherID that is openly accessible, so that a researcher can place a link of the ID on her website?

ISI and RID v Scopus

MichelleLOyen — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 07:38:10 -0400

Interesting comparison, I had never used ISI before this experiment with Researcher ID and when I make a direct comparison the numbers are far "better" for me in Scopus: compared with ISI, I have 50% more publications (although this is in part because ASME and MRS proceedings are included), 35% more times cited (interesting since it's not like the proceedings are actually cited that often so that does not account for the difference) and an h-factor 2 higher. It will be interesting to see how this all shakes down.

Re: Citation metrics in ResearcherID

Zhigang Suo — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 10:50:58 -0400

This problem has disappeared.

Speculations about the future of ResearcherID

Zhigang Suo — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 08:31:00 -0400

The method proposed by the APS editor is unlikely to solve the problem of misidentification. Two people can have the same name with identical characters. Besides, I don't read Karean and many others don't read Chinese.

To solve the problem of misidentification, most likely we'll have to assign each author a unique identifier. We can try to have our ResearcherIDs included in our papers submitted to journals, printed along with our addresses. If many researchers do this, it is likely that publishers will ask for ResearcherIDs, just as they ask for email addresses.

The main difficulty seems to be this: which ID should prevail? The ResearcherID offered by Thomson Scientific, or some other ID created by another entity? In order for the ResearcherID to be universal, Thomson Scientific should make the service more open, allowing people to register with ResearcherID without subscribing to the Web of Knowledge. Coordination between ISI and publishers seems to be needed. If no agreement can be reached, a unified system of IDs may be required by the government, or offered by companies like Google or Amazon.

A 7-minute instruction video on using ResearcherID

Teng Li — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:38:46 -0400

Learn how to create your own Researcher ID and build a publication list in the following introductory video presentation:

http://www.brainshark.com/brainshark/vu/view.asp?pi=232547482

Many questions you may have in using ResearchID are answered in the video.

Citation metrics in ResearcherID

Teng Li — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 17:11:40 -0400

First of all, this is great service, with many things to be improved.

I have no difficulty to build up publication list, but share Michelle's difficulty in setting up citation metrics. I guess it should be done automatically but it keeps saying:

"None of the items in your publication list were added using the
Web of Science options on the Add Publications page."

Another observation is that, the publication titles are hyperlinked in my firefox browser, but not in IE.

Re: Researcher ID

MichelleLOyen — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 13:37:30 -0400

I just did it as well, it seems pretty straightforward and definitely helps me with the name problem but some of my papers are missing and I can't get the citation metrics thing to work at all! But definitely a good idea and worth the effort.

http://www.researcherid.com/rid/B-1600-2008

RE: Researcher ID

Kilho Eom — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 04:07:19 -0400

It is very easy to register Researcher ID and also easy to include the
publications to Researcher ID. It seems very useful to manage my
publication list for my own purpose as well as to provide the appropriate
publication list to one who is interested in the researches conducted by
a personnel registered to Researcher ID.

I will also update my iMechanica profile to include the Researcher ID.
It is quite simple to use Researcher ID!!!

Kilho

ResearcherID, a unique identifier of a researcher

Zhigang Suo — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 23:16:25 -0400

On the Web of Science my name appears sometimes as Suo Z and sometimes as Suo ZG. If I search for Suo Z*, papers by a biologist named Suo ZM mix in. Now Suo is a very rare name. I cannot imagine how Wang JS searches for his papers. Last year Michelle Oyen and I talked about assigning a unique identifier to each researcher, much like assigning an ISBN to each edition of a book, or assigning a DOI to each paper.

This issue of misidentification is not lost on the good engineers at Thomson Scientific, the publisher of the Web of Science. For months Thomson Scientific has been sending emails to promote a new service called ResearcherID. I finally got around last evening and registered.

Once you register, you are assigned a unique ID. You can choose to make your list of publications public. For example, here is my list: http://www.researcherid.com/rid/B-1067-2008. You can sort the list in three ways: by title, by times cited, and by date added. You can also view citation metrics such as the total number of articles in the list, the sum of times cited, and the h-index.

To obtain a ResearcherID, your institution must subscribe to the Web of Science. Once you are on the Web of Science, you first register with the Web of Science, and then sign in to the Web of Science. Subsequently, you register with ResearcherID. Once you sign in to ResearcherID, you add publications to your account.

This morning I showed the procedure to John Hutchinson. Here is John's list: http://www.researcherid.com/rid/B-1221-2008. We have noticed a few problems. As expected, the Web of Science does not index all the papers published by a researcher. Even for some of the indexed papers, ResearcherID does not seem to include all the papers in computing the citation metrics. For example, John's list contains 247 papers, but the citation metrics are based on 108 papers. ResearcherID shows his h-index to be 57, but if you go through the papers on the list, his h-index is 68. There are many other aspects that you wish ResearcherID to do better, but this first release seems to be a good beginning.

ResearcherID may become a standard tool for a researcher. Your administrators may ask for your ResearcherID, instead of a static list of publications. You may want to include the ID in you resume and website. (Your citation metrics are available to anyone who bothers to search. Why not get the numbers correctly yourself and tell the world?) Let's hope that we and our administrators can all think in many dimensions, with the ResearcherID being just one dimension.

Just for the fun of it, I have added a box in your iMechanica profile. Once you have your ResearcherID, you can update your iMechanica profile. Your ResearcherID will appear on the user list, and will also appear every time someone clicks on your photo.

Update on 18 April 2008.

The problem with the citation metrics mentioned above has disappeared.
A quick instruction for getting your own ResarcherID.
The initial annoucement from Thomson Scientific.