Persistent Identities

Imagine you have decided to change your name to mark a change in your life. Now think about all those research papers you’ve published under your old name. How are people going to connect them to you in the future?

You need to have a way to persistently associate the work with you, regardless of what form your name takes. Enter the persistent identifier (or PID), a unique alphanumeric designator independent of what you call yourself that can be attached to every work you’ve created. This is the principle of the ORCID, which we’ve discussed in a previous blog post.

What we didn’t mention there is that ORCID also provides an opportunity to prove the integrity of research. Article, grant and organisation information is supplied by funders, publishers and research organisations that you claim. This verified information can help publishers to identify paper mills with fake authors and made up publication histories, so that there is less fake research out in the world. ORCID is exploring ways to increase the amount of verified data in their system, without invading privacy and is introducing a way for researchers to verify their institution using their email address domain.

ORCIDs are available to all researchers for free, and is sustained by member organisations with subscriptions, such as our own!

But these persistent identifiers don’t just exist for people. There are other entities that change their name to rebrand, or that are likely to spawn alternate versions, like journal titles or research institutions.

For example, our own institution, rightly or wrongly, can be referred to as The University of Wolverhampton, University of Wolverhampton, Wolverhampton University, Wolverhampton Uni, and if you start looking for publications from our authors you will find all of these used, never mind the names of Faculties! Some of these are mistakes made by the journal or where the corresponding author has transcribed the name incorrectly, some will be historical changes, but where a ROR ID is used when entering affiliation information into publishing systems, these name variations are not a problem. The Research Organization Registry ID, another unique alphanumeric identifier, can be used to track which organisation is actually being referred to and tie to the corpus of research by the organisation. ROR IDs are being used with more regularity by research funders and publishers. You can find our ROR ID on the ROR website.

Similarly journal names can exist in many forms. It’s not uncommon for citations to refer to the short form of a journal, or for a journal to change its title to reflect a shift in editorial mission or new publisher. As a result, if someone is trying to track down an article by finding the website for a journal, and the journal is now known by a new name, they may not find it easy to do. International Standard Serial Numbers (or ISSNs) can help with this, though they aren’t easy to embed into a citation and were originally created to help libraries know which journal to order.

And while citations are great, it’s not unknown for transcription errors to sneak in that change the order of words or refer to an entirely different article by the same set of authors with a very similar title. Enter the digital object identifier, a persistent link to an article, that doesn’t need to change, whether the journal changes its name or the publisher refreshes the structure of its website.

DOIs aren’t just for articles, they appear on book chapters and other publications, and also on datasets where registered. There are two key registers for DOIs: CrossRef covers publications, while DataCite covers data. The ability to generate DOIs relies on an organisation having a subscription to the service, which most publishers and data repositories have.

An added benefit of having a DOI is that various services track DOIs for attention, such as Altmetric or PlumX Metrics. This allows you to investigate the impact of your research.

On PID registers, the records will feature metadata that identify the entity being referred to, which can often be used to autofill data in various systems used by funders, publishers and research organizations, saving you time.

Elements, the university’s CRIS, has integrations with ORCID, so if you record an ORCID on your profile, the system will be able to better identify information relating to you coming from other sources, meaning you are less likely to have to reject publications it thinks you wrote because another author has the same name as you.

So be persistent in your identifications. It will ensure you get the credit you deserve and save you time on data entry! But also, you’re helping increase the integrity of the public record for research and that is good for everyone!

Image credit: Web by John (2008) on a CC BY licence from Flickr