One of the biggest issues with using citation databases like Web of Science (or Scopus) is author ambiguity - people may have the same name to begin with, or the citation style you use may require the use of initials that make Lorena Catherine Leary indistinguishable from Logan C. Leary; this is exacerbated by the print origins of Web of Science that required the use of initials for everyone regardless of initial citation style. ResearcherID and its alternatives, Elsevier's Author Identifier and the brand new open source ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID - integrates ResearcherID and Author Identifier), create unique identifiers (like a DOI or PMID or ISSN, but for a person, not a document) that associate an author with his or her publications, eliminating (kinda) ambiguity. Once this identity association is created, new opportunities for citation metrics and collaboration also follow.

See the box under this one for information about adding works not in WoS to your ResearcherID profile.

ResearcherID makes it very easy to add your works to your profile if the work is an indexed Source Item in ISI Web of Knowledge or Web of Science, but how do you add works that are not included in those databases (including books)?  You can add any work as long as its bibliographic information is encoded in the .RIS bibliographic management file format. To convert a book or article to .RIS you can:

• Find your work in a database that allows you to export information in EndNote or .RIS format; email and/or save the file, then upload it
• Many link resolvers such as WSU's "Find it @ WSU" allow bibliographic citations to be converted to EndNote style/RIS and emailed; you can then upload to your ResearcherID profile
• Add it to EndNote Web and then directly upload it to ResearcherID
• If you use an EndNote alternative reference manager such as Zotero you can export a citation in .RIS format, then upload it to your ResearcherID profile

NOTE: non-WoS items will NOT be included in ResearcherID citation metrics! Which is a big issue...

Alternative Profile/Attribution systems are in the box below this one.

Check out this SlideShare deck about ORCID, Supporting Evaluation with Unique and Persistent Identifiers, presented by ORCID's Rebecca Bryant at the recent (2/2014) Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)

Basically, Web of Science's Researcher ID and Scopus' Author Identifier now flow into ORCID, so that is the identifier that researchers may want to create and publicize to help others locate their work, regardless of the name it was published under (i.e. maiden name vs married name, or initials versus full names) and disambiguate them from others with similar names. 

ORCID is also starting to be integrated with other academic networking and reach tools.