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Tracking researchers and their outputs: new insights from ORCIDs

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Abstract

The ability to accurately identify scholarly authors is central to bibliometric analysis. Efforts to disambiguate author names using algorithms or national or societal registries become less effective with increases in the number of publications from China and other nations where shared and similar names are prevalent. This work analyzes the adoption and integration of an open source, cross-national identification system, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID system (ORCID), in Web of Science metadata. Results at the article level show greater adoption, to date, of the ORCID identifier in Europe as compared with Asia and the US. Focusing analysis on individual highly cited researchers with the shared Chinese surname “Wang,” results indicate limitations in the adoption of ORCID. The mechanisms for integrating ORCID identifiers into articles also come into question in an analysis of co-authors of one particular highly cited researcher who have varying percentages of articles with ORCID identifiers attached. These results suggest that systematic variations in adoption and integration of ORCID into publication metadata should be considered in any bibliometric analysis based on it.

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Fig. 1

Source: Web of Science, January 31, 2017 based on 5,129,893 articles, 802,632 proceedings, and 19,913,828 total document record counts in the Web of Science based on searches of the publication year, article and proceedings paper document types, using “0000*” to represent the ORCID iD

Fig. 2

Source ResearcherID & ORCID Integration, http://wokinfo.com/researcherid/integration/

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Laurel Haak and ZL Wang for their assistance with this study. We also thank Joshua Brown and Adèniké Deane-Pratt from ORCID, and Patricia Brennan, Helen Muth, and Joe Barton from Clarivate Analytics for their help with interpreting the findings. This study was undertaken with support from the US National Science Foundation under Award 1645237 (EAGER: Using the ORCID and Emergence Scoring to Study Frontier Researchers). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors or individuals who provided assistance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Enterprise Innovation Institute, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, 30308, USA

    Jan Youtie

  2. Search Technology, 6025 The Corners Pkwy Suite 202, Norcross, GA, 30092, USA

    Stephen Carley & Alan L. Porter

  3. School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, 685 Cherry Street, Atlanta, GA, 30332 – 0345, USA

    Stephen Carley, Alan L. Porter & Philip Shapira

  4. Manchester Institute of Innovation Research, Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK

    Philip Shapira

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  1. Jan Youtie
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Correspondence to Jan Youtie.

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Youtie, J., Carley, S., Porter, A.L. et al. Tracking researchers and their outputs: new insights from ORCIDs. Scientometrics 113, 437–453 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2473-0

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