Author identifiers are meant to help authors track their publications. In order to measure your impact as an author, you want to be sure you get credit for all your research output. You can end up with several author profiles or have your work incorrectly associated with another researcher if you have published under variations of your name, changed your name, or changed the institutions. One way to make sure you are credited for all your work is to register for an author identified with ORCID, which allows you to connect all your research to one identifier.
Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) is a persistent digital identifier for researchers. Registering for an ORCID identifier is free and easy.
Once you have your unique ORCID identifier, you can create a profile and/or link it to your other author IDs and profiles (e.g., ResearcherID, My NCBI, LinkedIn). You can associate existing publications with your ORCID profile by importing from sources like Scopus and Web of Science. Going forward, use your ORCID identifier in all stages of your research workflow (grant applications, manuscript submissions, etc.) to make sure that you get credit for your work.
You can create an author profile in Google Scholar Citations. Once you have a profile, you can view your citation metrics and create email alerts every time one of your publications is cited. See an example below.
