I Am Not a Scientist, I Am a Number

We suspect many of our readers will be familiar with the cult TV show The Prisoner, in which actor Patrick McGoohan had his identity taken away by unknown assailants for unknown reasons, and his pleas of ‘‘I am not a number, I am a person’’ (http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v = 29JewlGsYxs&feature = related) were greeted with variants of ‘‘whatever you say, number six.’’ We would suggest that, as scientists, we are in a situation where the opposite will soon be true, at least for the purposes of scientific scholarship. Scientists will want to be assigned a number, or at least a unique identifier. Why? Imagine a time when you and your complete scholarly output—papers, grant applications, blog posts, etc.—could be identified online and in perpetuity and returned in a variety of easy-to-digest ways. While ego comes into it as a driver to make this happen, measuring scientific career advancement is something that lacks good metrics in a digital world. Unless one has a truly unique name, applying such a metric is not possible now. Even with a unique name, what is the guarantee that all of our scholarly output will be captured by one source of that information? In the end, we as individuals are the only ones who reliably track our scholarly output. This situation is beginning to change, and, as we shall see, new metrics have the promise of much more than simply returning references to our collective life’s work as currently described by research papers, research proceedings, books, and book chapters. Although even a complete and current resume generated on demand would be a big step, if it could be returned in a variety of formats for a variety of purposes. These complete resumes are something many of us spend endless hours generating. The idea of having our scholarly output properly characterized is not out of reach, since the articles we write are already identified uniquely by a Digital Object Identifier (DOI; discussed further below). A book or journal is identified by an ISBN, and citations are identified by PubMed identifiers, and so on. The ideas discussed here simply take this identification process for individual publications and citations to the point of providing unique descriptors for each author and to uniquely identify all of each author’s scholarly work.