Life in the world of research is complicated, but it gets worse when you have a relatively common last name like “Simon.” There are thousands of research publications written by a Simon, and narrowing it down to “Simon S” or even “Simon SD” doesn’t seem to help. So how do you quickly identify all the publications that you have written? One way is to apply for a unique identifier from ORCID, an “open, non-profit, community-based effort to provide a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers.”

I did that today and my ORCID ID is 0000-0002-0613-008X. You can find a brief biography of me at ORCID by going to http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0613-008X. I will work on this and add publications that are really the true SD Simon and not someone else who happens to share my last name and first two initials. It will help some, but I suspect I will always have problems with this. For details, see http://www.pmean.com/08/ImpossibleResume.html.