Researchers: here’s how to audit your fragmented digital identity
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Databases that track academic publications can create duplicate researcher profiles, misattribute citations and list incorrect affiliations.Credit: Vasilina Popova / Getty
When news broke last November that Guo Wei, a well-known researcher in China, had been suspended after serious discrepancies were found in his stated qualifications, social-media pundits quickly swooped in to ask the obvious question: how did no one notice earlier?
It is tempting to assume that a quick online search would have exposed inconsistencies in his education, affiliations and publication record. So, shortly after the news broke, we set out to test this assumption, drawing on our experience as librarians working with researchers’ digital identities.
A search for ‘Guo Wei’ in ORCID, a global system for tracking academics and their research activity, returned 616 profiles. None of them had been affiliated with the Jiangsu University of Science and Technology in Zhenjiang, China, the organization that fired the researcher for misconduct. A search of Scopus, a prominent bibliographic database, produced 615 author records, three of which were nominally linked to the university, each listing a single publication. There was no reliable way to tell whether any of these records belonged to the same person. Even a diligent hiring panel would have struggled to verify who they were looking at, illustrating how even basic searches can become complicated when digital identities are fragmented.
Our experiences tell us that these scattered online profiles are becoming more common in science — and not just because of fraudsters. We feel that it’s crucial for academics to keep on top of their online profiles to collate a consistent image of themselves for potential collaborators, review panels and colleagues.
How identity ambiguity begins
Several digital platforms have tried to solve the problem of mismatched academic identities. ORCID, the social-media site LinkedIn, indexing databases and preprint servers all go to some lengths to distinguish between researchers who share the same name. But these platforms update according to their own schedules and have a variety of rules for their users. Even on a single platform, some details are captured more reliably than others. Scopus, for instance, receives information from the journals that it indexes, but the author profiles it produces do not always reflect a complete affiliation history.
A new form of CV for researchers