Unique Author ID Resources

To create a personal authority record in RWTH Publications, please select the option "Personalize" and "Your Personal Authority Record". It takes about 24 hours for the authority record to be completed with information from the Identity Management System of RWTH Aachen University (IdM).

Personal authority records can be identified by the prefix P:(DE-82)IDM followed by a five-digit number.

These author IDs are individualized. This includes in particular the first and last name variants, name changes, but also the assignment to an institution stored in the campus system of RWTH Aachen University as well as the e-mail address. When a person is selected in the submit mask of the database, an individualized personal standard record is displayed in this form: Mustermann, Max (RWTH:mustermann@ub.rwth-aachen.de / 021000) Author.

The IDM record allows you to create a personalized bibliography and keep it up-to-date. After a one-time check of the assigned publications and approval or rejection of the records, you can call up a complete list of your correctly assigned publications using the feature "all known publications". In order to obtain a correct assignment of the publications to your person for new entries, the IDM personal authority record is to be selected as the entry of the name.

ORCID is short for Open Researcher and Contributor ID. ORCID was founded in 2012 by stakeholders from academia and publishing specifically for author identification in academia and has since established itself as the de facto standard. ORCID is open, non-commercial, and cross-platform. This offering is the most important and comprehensive initiative in this field.

Publishers and research organizations enable a uniform author identification that can be used worldwide.

RWTH Aachen University is a member of ORCID and it is now possible to transfer data from RWTH Publications to your ORCID profile.

The RWTH Publications application adds your ORCID ID to your personal IDM authority record. This information is available when you enter a new record and is used during data transfer to third party systems. Note that RWTH Publications transfers your RWTH email address, name, and affiliation with RWTH Aachen University to ORCID. You can change or delete this data on ORCID at any time.

When you click on the "Register now" button, you will either be asked to register for an ORCID ID or, if you already have an ID, to log in to your ORCID account.

On the ORCID page, please grant RWTH Publications permission to add data to your ORCID profile.

You will be returned to the RWTH Publications website after authentication. Now you can transfer publication data already recorded in RWTH Publications to your ORCID profile.

In the blog post Autor:innenidentifikation mit der OCID ID: Warum und für wen?, the ORCID DE team answers key questions about the personal profile. 

AuthorClaim is a non-profit initiative, which has existed since 1999. The system is principally suitable for scientists in all disciplines, but it currently has a special role in business and engineering. After a profile is created, AuthorClaim searches for publications with the given name as well as variations of the name and offers documents to be accepted or rejected. The following databases serve as a datapool:

• RePEc (business and economics and related fields)
• ArXiv (physics, mathematics, computer science, nonlinear science, statistics, quantitative biology, and finance)
• CIS (statistics)
• PubMed (medicine, life sciences, and related disciplines)
• CiteSeer (computer and information sciences)
• dblp (Computer science)
• e-LIS (Information science and technology)
• Numerous document servers from universities worldwide

The current datapool is being expanded.

Academica.edu is a social network for scientists. Here you have the possibility to create a comprehensive, personal profile and network with colleagues in your field.

ArXiv is the most renowned publication server in physics and related fields. Here, authors have the possibility to create so-called Author Identifiers. The following features are offered:

• Personal publication list as a webpage with a stable address
• RSS feeds
• JavaScript MyArticles-widget, to include publication lists on your homepage
• Facebook link, to post or comment on documents uploaded to Facebook

RePEc Author Service is a subject-specific registration system. This identification system was founded in 1999 and links author names from the field of economics with publications in the in the same-named database. For author registration, the author himself or herself creates a profile and assigns publications.

MRAuthorID is the registration system of the MathSciNet database of the American Mathematical Society. Since the 1980s, an integrated author database has been built up, which allows the publications of an individual author to be found even if there are variants of the name or identical names of different authors.

InspireID is the registration system of the INSPIRE database from high energy physics. Authors can use the person search facility to claim publications, add others, and remove those that have not been correctly assigned.

The Gemeinsamen Normdatei (GND) contains authority data for persons, corporate bodies, conferences, geographies, keywords and work titles. These are primarily used for cataloging literature in libraries. The GND is maintained jointly by the German National Library (DNB), all German-language library networks with their affiliated libraries, the periodicals database and numerous other institutions. Authors of monographic works are recorded with their name, any variations of their name, biographical data, a geographical reference, and other information that makes it possible to assign the person without ambiguity.

Person authority records are created by the participating libraries. Requests for corrections can be submitted via the university library of RWTH Aachen University or directly to the GND editorial office.

Web of Science ResearcherID is offered since April 2019 from Publons, the same provider of the Web of Science database. The special characteristic of this offer is the collaboration with ORCID. Authors registered here can also log into ORCID. The data is regularly synchronized.

Scopus Author ID is the author identification of the bibliographic database Scopus (Elsevier). Unlike the Web of Science, Scopus independently creates an author profile as soon as a publication is listed in the database. However, the profile may be incomplete or incorrect for this reason. The author profiles can be viewed via the author search, corrections can be suggested and the service can be linked to an ORCID account.

Despite limited search options and intransparency of the database, Google Scholar is a much-used search engine especially for scientific literature. After creating a profile, publications can be added manually by the author. In addition to that, Google suggests publications that can then be claimed by the author or rejected.
Google Scholar also offers bibliometric indicators, the so-called Google Scholar Citations Profile. Please note that we cannot recommend this feature, as the data is not valid.
Google Scholar is not linked to ORCID yet.

Microsoft Academic Search is a search engine specifically for academic literature. This system works similarly to the Google Scholar Citations Profile. Unfortunately, we cannot recommend this system either, since its data is also not valid.