PubMed® Author ID Project

The National Library of Medicine® (NLM®) National Center for Biotechnology Information(NCBI) is developing a system that will address the problem of ambiguous author names within PubMed and facilitate accurate search and retrieval of a participating author's works. The specifics of PubMed Author ID, as the system is now known, are still evolving. It is currently envisioned that authors (or their designees) would register for the service through My NCBI and identify their research articles in PubMed using provided tools; this identification of articles will allow NCBI to link alternate names/spellings associated with an individual. The anticipated launch for PubMed Author ID is in mid-2011.

NLM has already laid the foundation for the system by developing a process for NIH-funded authors to identify their articles for grant reporting purposes. NLM expects to make PubMed Author ID interoperable with multiple external author ID systems, such as those developed by publisher groups, non-profit organizations, and other countries. NLM has not yet identified external author ID systems that it will incorporate in PubMed Author ID, but will work with outside groups as systems are developed in this rapidly evolving area.

Update

[Editor's note: This information was added on April 2, 2014.]

Currently, NLM is not developing a PubMed Author ID system. However, NLM accepts author identifiers from outside organizations like ORCID when supplied to us by publishers with citation data. Also, PubMed disambiguates authors using the Computed Author display sort. Please see the NLM Technical Bulletin article "PubMed and Computed Author Sorted Display" for more information.

Finally, we encourage all PubMed authors to create, maintain and share their own list of PubMed citations in the My NCBI My Bibliography feature. For more information please see My NCBI help.

PubMed® Author ID Project. NLM Tech Bull. 2010 Nov-Dec;(377):e2.