Surviving in science these days is all about high impact. How is this impact being measured? Managers, deans,  operators, science editors and grant officers, to mention just a few non-active scientists, know the answer exactly. They judge the scientist by the:

1. number of papers published in refereed journals
2. number of papers in high-impact journals
3. number of citations, and more specifically by the h-index

To remind you: if the h-index of a scientist is 20 the scientist has coauthored 20 papers with at least 20 citations.

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Unique author identification is a longstanding issue in scientific publishing. Currently there are a number of systems under development that promise a variety of functionalities. I am not going to give here an extensive overview of this wide range of systems, an up to date article can be found here. While a universally recognized standard such as the ISO standard International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) system will undoubtedly be useful as a way to categorize any type of authors, artists and scientists, the practical use of an author identifier will be strongly related to the availability of linked information such as lists of publications.

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Here is a short contribution on how to correct misspelled citations in Web of Science. Citations have become the currency of science, which is used to reward scientists and scientific institutions. Small variations in citation scores can make millions of pounds difference in the financial outcomes of national Research Assessments . Therefore keeping your citation record updated is of critical importance.

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When you are doing research, you tend to collect a lot of papers. I remember that at the end of m PhD, when I moved to another continent to do a postdoc, I dumped a huge box of photocopies in my parents’ basement. A few years ago, I had collected two cupboards full of photocopies. It was getting seriously out of hand. Then, of course, journals started putting everything online as PDFs and the same process started all over again but this time filling up hard disk folders instead. I used to have subject-based folders, which sort of worked until something fit within 2 or 3 or 4 of my subjects. Searching for some old paper you had read a few years back became more and more nightmarish. Then somebody showed me Papers.

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