Tracking researchers and their outputs: new insights from ORCIDs

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.