Chemical & Engineering News overviews name ambiguity and discusses ORCID as "in the works" solution, highlighting both algorithmic solutions and manual disambiguation.

Researchers who obtain an alphanumeric ORCID will be able to set up an online profile page that includes information such as affiliations, publications, contact information...The researcher will control what information remains private and what can be accessed freely by the public.

On manual disambiguation: Researchers were asked to log in to Lattes [Database] to ensure their data were complete and correct, with the incentive that this data would be used in funding decision-making,” Börner says. “The result was one of the cleanest researcher databases in existence today,” she says. “So imagine if the National Science Foundation and NIH would step up and say, ‘We need such a system.’ ” Börner believes that would entice authors in the U.S. “to do the last 10% or 15% of cleanup, which cannot be done automatically.