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All Researchers To Be Allocated Unique IDs
ananyo writes with information on a new scheme to help uniquely identify authors in the face of ambiguous names. From the article: "In 2011, Y. Wang was the world's most prolific author of scientific publications, with 3,926 to their name — a rate of more than 10 per day. Never heard of them? That's because they are a mixture of many different Y. Wangs, each indistinguishable in the scholarly record. The launch later this year of the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID), an identifier system that will distinguish between authors who share the same name, could soon solve the problem, allowing research papers to be associated correctly with their true author. Instead of filling out personal details on countless electronic forms associated with submitting papers or applying for grants, a researcher could also simply type in his or her ORCID number. Various fields would be completed automatically by pulling in data from other authorized sources, such as databases of papers, citations, grants and contact details. ORCID does not intend to offer such services itself; the idea is that other organizations will use the open-access ORCID database to build their own services."
Hmm. A new program to uniquely track and identify scientists springs up in the middle of an all out war between science and the idiocracy. Totally coincidental. *adjusts tin foil hat*
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
... - one of them, for example, is ResearcherID at http://www.researcherid.com/ . None of them have really taken off so far, and there is nothing to say that this one will. I am skeptical.
I'm so glad they made the ID a fixed length 16-digit number. Experience shows that we are very good at predicting the total number of IDs ever to be needed.
Plus 54 bits should be more than enough, so no need to make the number extensible, thus wasting one precious bit as a field extension identifier.
Hmm. A new program to uniquely track and identify scientists springs up in the middle of an all out war between science and the idiocracy. Totally coincidental. *adjusts tin foil hat*
No need to adjust your tinfoil hat. I read this article and thought "Oh, great, now Virginia's Attorney General can conduct more accurate witch hunts." (he was unable to properly identify over 30 scientists and researchers)
My work here is dung.
is researcher M.Y. Wang. He does mostly the same experiment once or twice a day.
Can't we just sign docs with a private key? The public key's finger print can be your unique id. Or are we still attached to paper?
The Writers Guild of America requires that all members have unique names. There cannot be two of the same person as to prevent confusion. This is evident with David X. Cohen, well known as a writer for The Simpsons and Futurama. His real name is David S. Cohen but the Writers Guild of America already had a David S., so he took David X. Cohen.
Overall, I thought having multiple researchers with the same name was a good thing.
Then we could each take credit for one another's work, and we'd all collectively be the biggest badass in science. It'd sure make research funding easier, in any case.
I have a last name that is very uncommon in the Netherlands, even more so because it is capitalized differently than usual, and it is "misspelled" to boot. Even so, there's a guy (not family) who shares my first and last name, went to the same university, same department, and graduated on a topic similar to mine. We've published on overlapping topics. So yes, confusion does happen, and I've often been contacted by someone looking for the other guy. Sounds nice since I have just four publications to my name whereas he went into research and has many more, but of course I can't take credit...
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Oh great, another guy with the same name as me. No wonder no one knew I was the one that published on Creating Cold Fusion Using Two Matchsticks, A Fake Mustache, and a Left-Handed Monkey Wrench.
Actually, there is. My wife is a PhD who studies stroke and epilepsy. There is another scientist in Germany who has the same first initial and last name who also studies stroke. He's been writing papers ~20 years longer than my wife has, but when you search for her papers, you get craploads(SAE standard measure) of his, as well.
Yes. And people switch institutions, and fields. At the moment, if someone has a common name, looking up their papers is an exercise in AI. With a unique identifier you'd be able to tell Google Scholar "get me all the other papers by this author in the last ten years."
I am sure it happens, but (a) it seems unlikely that they would be in the same field
I have a few name collisions just in my own reference database (i.e., list of papers to which I've referred in my own work.) I can pretty much guarantee that if you look at the author lists for any major single-subject journal, you'll find a whole bunch of identical $FIRST_INITIAL $LAST_NAME entries which are not, in fact, the same people.
Hell, I have a pretty rare (in the US, at least) last name -- and occasionally I still get e-mails from people who think I'm the Daniel Dvorkin who wrote a paper on psoriasis in 1989. It's not entirely unreasonable, since my name appears on a couple of papers related to inflammatory disease, but I'm a grad student in Colorado, not a dermatologist in Pennsylvania ...
and (b) it seems even less likely that they would be at the same institution and (c) even less likely that their contact information would be the same so are there really cases where there is confusion over who wrote a paper
True enough, but people who are looking at author names are not necessarily looking at the entire paper (where contact information is usually given.) A related problem is that journal publications are increasingly subject to various kinds of text data mining, and rightly or wrongly, the format for fields like author institution and contact information isn't standardized from journal to journal -- and in academia, both institutions and e-mail addresses are subject to frequent change. If you published a paper five years ago while at the University of East Dakota and your e-mail in the corresponding author field was given as betterunixthanunix@eastdak.edu, and you're now at South Virginia State with the address butu@svs.edu, good luck getting any database to make that connection without human assistance.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
It is interesting on their position on this, we will create the method but someone else will have to create the database and maintain it. What I see here is that they see a bag of worms when it comes to privacy issues and do not what to touch that part of it. If an issue results in some aspect of the collection of such information, ORCID’s only involvement will be the DB structure. They had better include some temple or recommended best know practices on how a collection of this data should be handled.
Creating it is one thing, operating such a creation should also be addressed before untended consequences happen.
France used to require government approval for children's names when registering births. This was a francophone thing, not a uniqueness thing. But it could have been expanded to use a uniqueness check. Corporation and D/B/A names have to be unique within their jurisdiction.
Names in China used to be disambiguated by asking "What is your village?" This is no longer very helpful.
We developed recently a web service for recommending papers, reviewers and journals out of the citations of a paper ( http://theadvisor.osu.edu/ ). Having conflict in the names can be problematic. Many paper recommendation algorithms use the property that two papers share the same authors, they must be somewhat related. Having name conflict lower the quality of that assumption. Though, some database are already disambiguated. For instance DBLP adds an ID to the name in case there is more than one. (but it is a manual process)
Think of the birthday paradox. It's quite unlikely that any given researcher has the same name as any other given researcher. But there are n!/(2(n-2)!) pairs to consider, which gets big really fast, so you have to adjust your expectations for multiple comparisons.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
This would actually be a huge boon for students looking for a research mentor or PI. I spent months trawling through google and WoS looking through faculty and it was a gigantic mess trying to separate out who was who. The professors of Asian origin were by far the worst to get through as they had 200 other guys with the same name boosting their publication counts to absurd levels. Its made worse by the habit of moving around the country and name abbreviations. Algorithms and narrowing the search criteria could only get you so far since you still have thousands of Chens working in biochemistry at the same time. This could make an hour long search instantaneous.