what’s your number?

The PLoS blog has an interesting entry by Richard Cave, PLoS’s IT director, on the topic of unique author identification. If you’ve done more than a couple dozen literature searches, odds are you’ve run into cases where you’ve asked yourself “is I. Niedebeternaym the I. Niedebeternaym I’m looking for?” Sometimes authors share names; sometimes individual authors list their names differently on different papers; and sometimes authors change names (e.g., after getting married). While most of us can probably agree that it’d be nice if unique author IDs existed, there are plenty of technical issues that need be resolved before such a system can be implemented. See the full post for an insightful discussion.