In a recent article, our good friends Phil Bourne and J. Lynn Fink wrote about a new system championed by Thomson Reuters. The system is based on the OpenID system and is cleverly dubbed ResearcherID. The system ties in your profile and your published materials with a number thus eliminating the ambiguity of human names like Smith.

In principle, this is not a bad idea but as Bourne and Fink point out, there are many ifs. Other identification efforts championed on the web have not taken off. Passport from Microsoft was one of the more prominent ones. I think that Thomson Reuters would benefit from understanding the reasons behind the failure of these systems.

Here’s my take on this. First, I don’t want to be a number. I want to be a person. I am flesh and blood and personality and a number is none of these. Second, I don’t really care about making it easier to disambiguate my name : Barak Shahen. How many of us are out there? In fact, how many scientists have truly ambiguous names? On the other hand, these systems can only work if there is wide adoption. Finally, this only makes sense for me if the publishers, universities and other organizations make ResearcherID easy and transparent. What are the chances of that happening any time soon?

That being said, OpenID is trying to solve an important problem. We at Orwik have solved the problem of disambiguation in a different way but to find out details, you’ll have to stay tuned here.

P.S. Bourne and Fink propose a different and intriguing benefit of ResearcherID: the possibility of quantifying research impact based on a combination of metrics other than the citation index. I think that this is a great idea and goes directly to some of the things I blogged about in my previous post.