We should be just a number and we should embrace it

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to support the use of unique identifiers for the authors of scientific publications. This, the authors believe, aligns with the views of many others, as it would solve the problem of author disambiguation. If every researcher had a unique identifier, there would be significant opportunities to provide even more services. These extensions are proposed in this paper. Design/methodology/approach The authors discuss the bibliographic services that are currently available. This leads to a discussion of how these services could be developed and extended. Findings The authors suggest a number of ways that a unique identifier for scientific authors could support many other areas of importance to the scientific community. This will provide a much more robust system that provides a much richer and more easily maintained, scientific environment. Originality/value The scientific community lags behind most other communities with regard to the way it identifies individuals. Even if the current vision for a unique identifier for authors was to become more widespread, there would still be many areas where the community could improve its operations. This viewpoint paper suggests some of these, along with a financial model that could underpin the functionality.

Risks of abuse of large language models, like ChatGPT, in scientific publishing: Authorship, predatory publishing, and paper mills

“…Unless there is an aggressive campaign to clamp‐down on this form of academic fraud, and retract such papers (Rivera & Teixeira da Silva, 2021), science may have finally found its ultimate challenger that could result in its collapse (of trust, integrity, and transparency). Even if some journals are able to detect papers derived from paper mills, and discard submissions prior to peer review (Hackett & Kelly, 2022), the authors of such papers will typically suffer no legal challenges or consequences by the rejecting journal, suffering perhaps an ethical slap on the wrist or a warning, and those authors will—with impunity, perhaps even jokingly—resubmit their fraudulent publication to a less fortunate (i.e., not as astute) journal. In cases where publications derived from paper mills are detected at the post‐publication stage, they may be retracted, but even then, the damage to the integrity of the knowledge stream is done, and permanent, with such fake papers having been cited, sometimes heavily cited (Pérez‐Neri et al, 2022). Some authors may leave retracted papers on their curriculum vitae in an unretracted status in the hope/expectation that the reader will not check. Paper mills may set up fake ORCID accounts that might be used only once to pass the journal's submission requirement of an ORCID for the corresponding author; that is, ghost, single‐use or disposable ORCIDs (Kendall et al, 2017; Teixeira da Silva, 2021b). Even though some publishers like Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, and Frontiers have been testing a prototype system to detect paper mill products (Else, 2022), this is far from being an industry‐wide response and does not protect the free flow of information across journals' borders, since papers' knowledge sources are linked via references, which might be poorly screened, even by peer reviewers and editors.…”

“…• Paper mills may set up fake ORCID accounts that might be used only once to pass the journal's submission requirement of an ORCID for the corresponding author; that is, ghost, single-use or disposable ORCIDs (Kendall et al, 2017;Teixeira da Silva, 2021b). Even though some publishers like Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, and Frontiers have been testing a prototype system to detect paper mill products (Else, 2022), this is far from being an industry-wide response and does not protect the free flow of information across journals' borders, since papers' knowledge sources are linked via references, which might be poorly screened, even by peer reviewers and editors.…”

Setting Our Cites on Gender: Toward Development of Inclusive Scholarly Support Services for All Faculty

“…Kendall, Yee, and Hardy's 2017 article title declares "We should be just a number and we should embrace it," and discusses potential benefits of universal adoption of tools such as ORCID. 5 ORCID is important for name-disambiguation, and is being embedded or required in various places throughout the scholarly lifecycle. 6 However, there is little discussion of how gender plays a role in ORCID or any of the profile systems described above.…”

A bibliometric services workshop for subject librarians

“…Librarians select, recommend and maintain citation databases for measuring researcher impact, each of which have been shown to have differences in disciplinary coverage (Bar-Ilan, 2008;De Groote and Raszewski, 2012;Harzing and Alakangas, 2016;Mongeon and Paul-Hus, 2016;Powell and Peterson, 2017;Vieira and Gomes, 2009). Author disambiguation strategies, required for reliable author summary metrics, rely on carefully crafted search queries and author identifiers commonly championed by librarians (Carley et al, 2017;Elliott, 2010;Kendall et al, 2017). The growing complexity of tracking publication impact and rising interest in these metrics at an institutional level have only increased librarians' involvement (Bronars, 2016;Corrall et al, 2013;Kear and Colbert-Lewis, 2011).…”