Digital Scholarship Centre

Identifiers are used in scholarship to connect a work with a specific individual, institution, funder, or location online. They are unique strings of letters or numbers that help with discoverability, credit, and assessment.

Take authorship, for example: an author identifier is "a unique 'symbol' for an author that can be used to distinguish that person’s work from all others, regardless of any similarities of name, institution, or discipline". Authorship ambiguity can be a consequence of a number of factors. For example, a researcher might have a common name, might have previously published under a variation of a name (for example, used a middle initial), or might have a name change as a result of a life event. By associating a paper with an author identifier, there is less uncertainty as to whether that publication is written by the Jane Smith at a university in South Africa or the Jane Smith at a university in Australia.

To create or change your CV information on your UFS staff member page, log in to the staff app with your UFS credentials. You will be able to upload a photo and a CV document, but also add a short CV, your publications list, research content, areas of interest, areas of expertise, modules you are currently presenting, community and service learning content.

ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from other researchers and supports automated linkages between you and your work. You will see funding organisations and publishers are requesting ORCID IDs in grant and manuscript submissions. See our guide on ORCID for more information and assistance in setting up your ORCID ID.

Once registered in ORCID, you can import the papers from ResearcherID (Web of Science) and Scopus:

1. Login to your ORCID record.
2. Under Works section 
3. Click on "+Add works" and then "Search & link".
4. Follow the on screen prompts to send your papers to ORCID.

Importing publications from Google Scholar to ORCID:

1. Login to your ORCID record
2. Under Works section 
3. Click "+Add works" and then "Import BibTeX"
4. Follow the instructions.

You can also search for and add papers manually:

1. Login to your ORCID record. 
2. Under Works section 
3. Click "+Add works" under the Works section of your profile.
4. Review the search results or enter information manually to add papers to your profile.

A Web of Science ResearcherID is a unique identifier that connects you to your publications across the Web of Science ecosystem (i.e.,Web of Science, Publons, and InCites) and provides the global research community with an invaluable index to author information.

Having a Web of Science ResearcherID helps:

• solve author identity issues
• ensure correct attribution between you and your publications on the Web of Science
• add dynamic citation metrics from Web of Science and other missing metadata to publication records on your Publons profile, Web of Science, InCites and more
• effortlessly keep your ORCID up to date by linking it to your ResearcherID on Publons

Assigning a unique ResearcherID to every researcher with at least one publication on the Web of Science standardises and clarifies author names and citations, and makes your information search straightforward and accessible.

Scopus Author Identifier allows you to track your publications indexed in the Scopus citation database and build metric reports. You can also use Scopus to follow the outputs of other researchers and institutions and identify potential collaborators and research topics.

To get started, you need to register an account with your University of the Free State email (if you already have registered for another Elsevier service, use those credentials to log in). 

• A Scopus Author ID is automatically generated the first time one of your publications is indexed in Scopus.
• When logged in to Scopus, search for your name or one of your indexed publications and go to your Author Details page (click on your name when it appears in a search results list). 
• Variant publishing names may lead to Scopus generating multiple IDs for the same author. Ensure you merge all your IDs to optimise your citation metrics. You can do this by clicking on Request to merge authors after selecting your different author profiles.
• From your Author Details page, click on Request author detail corrections  to open the Author Feedback Wizard to review your profile and publication list, and add alternative publishing names and other affiliations.
• Use the Author Feedback Wizard to connect to ORCID.

Google Scholar Profiles provide a simple way for authors to showcase their academic publications. You can check who is citing your articles, graph citations over time, and compute several citation metrics. You can also make your profile public, so that it may appear in Google Scholar results when people search for your name. 

A Google Scholar profile will help Google Scholar easily and accurately group all the citations of your publications into one pool. A profile generally lists your name, chosen keywords of research interest, generated citation metrics, and citations (including links to citing articles). In order to create a Google Scholar profile you will need a Google Account. Once your profile is set up, it will automatically update.

How to create your profile:

1. Sign to your Google account, or create one if you don't have one.
2. After you sign in, the Citations sign up form will ask you to confirm the spelling of your name, to enter your affiliation, etc. 
3. On the next page, you will see a list of articles. Add the articles that are yours.
4. Once you're done with adding articles, it will ask you what to do when the article data changes in Google Scholar. You can either have the updates applied to your profile automatically or you can choose to review them beforehand.
5. Finally, you will see your profile. Once you are satisfied with the results, make your profile public.

How to import Google Scholar publications into ORCID:

ORCID has created a tool that allows you to import citations from BibTeX (.bib) files into your ORCID record, including files exported from Google Scholar and other popular citation management tools: Import and export links with BibTeX.

A Digital Object Identifier, or DOI, is a unique and permanent string of numbers and letters assigned to a digital object such as a journal article. Publishers and repositories often assign DOIs at the time of publication. The benefit of a DOI is that it is persistent and will not change even if the item's location online changes. They help to mitigate the challenge of broken links.

The University of the Free State is registered with CrossRef to mint DOIs.