“The Registering Researchers Task Group aims to create a concise report that summarizes the benefits and trade-offs of emerging approaches to the problem of incomplete national authority files.

Background – National name authority files are incomplete. Many researchers—tenured and non-tenured faculty and graduate students—are only partially represented in national name authority files. National name authority files cover poorly authors of journal articles and exclude researchers who do not publish but who create or contribute to data sets and other research activities. Uniquely identifying the academic authors of allpublications, including journal articles, and researchers who do not publish, facilitates compiling individuals’ scholarly output, especially as their affiliations change over time. The scholarly output is a factor in the reputation and ranking of the scholar’s affiliated institution.

Impact – Our goal is to identify:

• the benefits, needs, and challenges for integrated author identification;
• approaches to effectively integrate multiple author identifier systems, and to reconcile information from multiple sources; and
• models, channels and workflows for registering and maintaining integrated author and researcher information.

The broader impact of this work will be to make it easier for researchers and institutions to more accurately measure their scholarly output.”