ORCID To Be Required of Authors

Many author names in IEEE Xplore are not unique. For example, there are more than 60,000 authors whose last name is Kim, more than 30,000 whose last name is Zhang, and more than 10,000 each whose last name is Smith, or Nguyen, or Kumar or Singh. An author's name can also change; e.g., as a result of marriage.

How is one to determine which C. Park an author is when there are more than 13,780 C. Parks in IEEE Xplore's Well, by the end of 2016, IEEE will start to require an ORCID from authors of papers submitted to a periodical, with a similar requirement on conference submissions to follow. ORCID, Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is a nonproprietary and persistent alphanumeric code to uniquely identify authors, just as the DOI, Digital Object Identifier, is a unique and persistent code that uniquely identifies articles.

An example of an ORCID is "orcid.org/0000-0002-2378-0113." Researchers may obtain an ORCID for free at https://orcid.org/register. Further information may be found at http://orcid.org/.