ORCID was meant to solve name ambiguity

 

As individual as we all are, our names are really not that unique, and attempts to link research activities and outcomes to a person’s name have led to endless confusion in the past. Even in the same discipline, hundreds or even thousands of researchers can have the same or similar names. There can be endless variations of names, which can change over time: Yasmine Mohammad Omar Yousef, Yasmine Yousef, Yasmine M. Yousef. Researchers learned a long time ago that names are not enough to ensure credit for their work.
 
ORCID, as a name-independent person-identifier, was founded specifically to help solve the problem of name ambiguity in research, and to enable transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and their affiliations.
 
To meet this use case, the important characteristics of ORCID iDs are that they are unique, persistent, and controlled by a single real-world individual. Unique so that people with the same name can be distinguished from one another; persistent so that one individual can maintain the same ORCID iD throughout their entire career; controlled by a single individual so that users of ORCID data can be reasonably confident that the data contained in the ORCID record is the data that the record-holder wishes to present to the world about themselves. It is not necessary for our use case for the availability of ORCIDs to be restricted to a specific class of individuals, nor for some authority to control who may obtain an ORCID.
 
Distinguish yourself now! Register for your ORCID iD at: https://orcid.org/register