Author ID's link you to your publications across multiple platforms and locations. ID's remove confusion around multiple versions of names or multiple identities with the same name.
They are especially useful for people with fairly common names, or with names that may be written in differing formats. Search functions may not connect different forms of the same name, but author ID's solve this problem.
Common author ID's include:
Medline and PubMed index ORCID and ISNI numbers when supplied by the publisher (since 2103). Embase indexes ORCID only (since 2015). When ID numbers are indexed, articles can be found by searching for the number. ResearcherID is indexed in Web of Science.
The National Health and Medical Research Council and Australian Research Council encourage all researchers applying for funding to have an ORCID identifier. It is integrated in to their grant management systems to streamline gathering of researcher information.
