GoKawiilDatabases that track academic publications can create duplicate researcher profiles, misattribute citations and list incorrect affiliations.Credit: Vasilina Popova / Getty
When news broke last November that Guo Wei, a well-known researcher in China, had been suspended after serious discrepancies were found in his stated qualifications, social-media pundits quickly swooped in to ask the obvious question: how did no one notice earlier?
It is tempting to assume that a quick online search would have exposed inconsistencies in his education, affiliations and publication record. So, shortly after the news broke, we set out to test this assumption, drawing on our experience as librarians working with researchers’ digital identities.
A search for ‘Guo Wei’ in ORCID, a global system for tracking academics and their research activity, returned 616 profiles. None of them had been affiliated with the Jiangsu University of Science and Technology in Zhenjiang, China, the organization that fired the researcher for misconduct. A search of Scopus, a prominent bibliographic database, produced 615 author records, three of which were nominally linked to the university, each listing a single publication. There was no reliable way to tell whether any of these records belonged to the same person. Even a diligent hiring panel would have struggled to verify who they were looking at, illustrating how even basic searches can become complicated when digital identities are fragmented.
Our experiences tell us that these scattered online profiles are becoming more common in science — and not just because of fraudsters. We feel that it’s crucial for academics to keep on top of their online profiles to collate a consistent image of themselves for potential collaborators, review panels and colleagues.
How identity ambiguity begins
Several digital platforms have tried to solve the problem of mismatched academic identities. ORCID, the social-media site LinkedIn, indexing databases and preprint servers all go to some lengths to distinguish between researchers who share the same name. But these platforms update according to their own schedules and have a variety of rules for their users. Even on a single platform, some details are captured more reliably than others. Scopus, for instance, receives information from the journals that it indexes, but the author profiles it produces do not always reflect a complete affiliation history.
A new form of CV for researchers
A researcher who moves institutions or publishes under several name variations (such as ‘Guo Wei’ and ‘Guo W.’) can accumulate several profilexs without realizing it, and people often stop managing old records. Moreover, anyone with a common name might be one of dozens of digital duplicates. These scattered records rarely create serious problems, but they often distort how researchers are seen: papers can drop out of databases, metrics can change unpredictably, affiliations can be unreliable and researchers might not receive full credit for the work that they have done. Long before the Guo case surfaced, we had already seen these problems first hand. In 2023, we examined the digital identities of all of the researchers at our own institution — the University of Bath, UK, where we work as research librarians — to understand the effects of ambiguous online identities. What we found made the scale of the issue clear and shaped the practical steps that we took to inform our colleagues of how to tidy up their online presence.
What our audit uncovered
... continue reading