Persistent research identifiers

Revision as of 19:21, 24 May 2021 by P.petrelli (talk | contribs)

Persistent identifiers provides a globally unique, internet based handle to identify uniquely a research product. They are widely used, everyone is familiar with the use of DOIs for papers, but now identifiers are also issued for data, code, researchers, research project and the institutions themselves.

The ARDC (Australian Research Data Commons) has a lot of resources on this subject on their website.

Digital Object Identifier

 

Researcher ID

Keeping track of the identity of individual researchers across global information systems presents many challenges. A researcher may use different variations of their name and several researchers may share the same name. Confusion arises when a researcher moves from one institution to another. An institution may even have the same researcher listed more than once in their own records. Similar problems emerge with groups of researchers.

To allow the discovery of research outputs that share a common researcher or research group, a common public identifier is needed for referencing. A researcher ID is a unique identifier which you can add to anything which define you as a researcher: papers, blogs, published datasets, web-pages, code repositories etc. It will help other researchers to identify you more easily and it will make it easier to discover any aspect of your work.

ORCID

There are several providers for researcher-ID, however, most Australian Institutions now recommend to use the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID). ORCID is an open, non-profit, community based initiative, and it is used globally. With an ORCID you can now automatically populate your RMS profile (Research Management  System) when applying for an ARC grant.

While this is not compulsory it will speed up your application process and make it easier to include all your research output including published data and codes.  If you have more than one researcher ID you can often link them together, though it is easier to manage only one. On the ARDC website you can find lots of resources including a variety of videos showing how a researcher ID works and why is important to have one.

Research Project indentifier

Institution and grant identifiers