Re: [IETF] Re: ORCID - unique identifiers for contributors

[Brian E Carpenter <[e-mail]>]

On 18/09/2013 09:11, Melinda Shore wrote:
> On 9/17/13 1:08 PM, Warren Kumari wrote:
>> On Sep 17, 2013, at 4:52 PM, Yoav Nir <[e-mail]> wrote:
>>> Having an IETF identity is OK if all you ever publish is in the
>>> IETF. Some of our participants also publish at other SDOs such as
>>> IEEE, W3C, ITU, and quite a few publish Academic papers. Using the
>>> same identifier for all these places would be useful,
>> Would it? Why?
> 
> It's useful to librarians/archivists/people who organize things.

It's very useful to people who maintain citation databases, where
uniquely identifying authors is necessary.

It's practically essential for academics whose career depends on
attribution of publications and on citation counts (and for the
people who hire or promote them).

At first sight, it doesn't seem to matter too much for the IETF itself,
until the day we have two authors with the same name, or one author
with two names. I think we have several instances of the latter, and
I can't really tell you easily if the following set of RFC authors
contains 10 people or more:

A. Li, C. Li, D. Li, H. Li, J. Li, K. Li, T. Li, X. Li, Y. Li, Z. Li.

A. Li, who authored RFC 2363, is an especially interesting case.
Probably the same person as A. Lin, who authored RFC 2764, but
worked for a different company.

I see that R.T. Braden, R. Braden and B. Braden have all authored
RFCs. One person or three?

In other words, objective identification would actually help sometimes.

   Brian