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Scholar Identity and Research Impact

This guide describes the digital scholarship landscape, how to build and manage your research identity, and the different methods and tools for tracking the impact of scholarship.

PIDs: What They Are, What They Do

Persistent Identifiers (PIDs) are a defined combination of numbers and letters that make it possible to uniquely and persistently reference objects, persons and organizations in the digital scholarly landscape. Their use is growing and is being applied to more and more areas of scholarship, such as to represent projects, software, data management plans, or conferences. PIDs confer authority through their representation and have become the 'currency' in the digital scholarship landscape. Canada is developing a national PID strategy for their research and scholarship, like other nations, to standardize how their knowledge contributions are represented.

Currently there are 5 categories of entities/things are have persistent identifiers: researchers, funders, organizations, grants, and outputs (publications, data etc.). PIDs are created through recognized registries or organizations.

 

A mandala image showing the categories of persistent identifiers and their relationship to entities such as author, organizations, funders etc.

Image: This simplified schema shows entity relationships within the research ecosystem. Each category is represented by some associated persistent identifiers. Identifiers can be either open or proprietary. Image created by TIB Projects and used under license CC BY 3.0
 

TYPES OF PERSISTENT IDENTIFIERS
 

PEOPLE

  • ORCID is an open identifier that allows any person to secure accurate attribution. Because it is open, it works across both open and closed (commercial) information products. Libraries has some library-supported systems that have integrations to encourage linkages between the work and your id including MSpace, and OJS.
  • Proprietary identifiers, such as Elsevier's Scopus ID, Clarivate's Web of Science Researcher ID, and Google Scholar profile, are used within their own systems to collate your works across their closed network of products. You can chose to link these profiles to ORCID so that you can automate the updating of your ORCID profile, regardless of platform.
     

WORKS

  • Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is a non-proprietary identifier and available by two registries Crossref and DataCite. It can be applied to an article, dataset, image, book chapter etc. Often, if you publish with a commercial publisher, the doi applied to your work is likely through Crossref. If you deposit your work in a repository, likely the doi comes from DataCite. You can activate both of these open registries in ORCID so you can automate the updating of ORCID through these sources. especially those works that are openly available.
  • Other work identifiers are usually specific to the type of work, like International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) and International Standard Book Number (ISBN). These identifiers are older than DOI and assigned as part of commercial products (books, journal publishers).
     

ORGANIZATIONS/ INSTITUTIONS

  • Research Organization Registry (ROR) is an open registry system that represents any organizations and institutions involved in research production or management. For this reason, it can also represent funders, publishers, research institutes and scholarly societies. In general, it only represents the top level of an organizational hierarchy; sub-levels, such as departments, are not represented. This identifier replace the GRID registry in 2021.
  • Other organization identifier systems exist, including International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) and Ringgold. ISNI is an ISO standard and is used to uniquely identify persons and organizations involved in creative activities, and is an open standard. Ringgold ID is a proprietary identifier system by Copyright Clearance Centre to track organizations that participate in commercial scholarly work and can represent sub-levels within a organization's hierarchy.
     

GRANTS

  • The Open Funder Registry managed by Crossref is the registry for grant ids. They are DOIs but specific for  grant-specific metadata such as award type, value and investigators. The intent is for funders to register each grant and provide a GrantID, which has the potential to make tracking papers and data linked to individual projects much simpler in the long run. Funders as organizations can be also associated with works using organizational ids (i.e. ROR).
     

PROJECTS

  • An emerging identifier system for projects is Research Activity ID (RAiD). This is a non-proprietary identifier supported by Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC). This identifier is intended to complete the network created by people, organization, and works as they relate to funders and the context of funding (i.e. projects). Since this not standard consideration by most of the research ecosystem, it is only used by early adopters at this time.