Sir

'J. Smith' published an astonishing 413 papers in the biosciences last year, with interests including radionuclides, retirement communities, HIV, endoglin (a TGF-β receptor-associated protein), childhood sexual abuse and its effect on the dating experiences of undergraduate women, rabies, t'ai chi and “Nice work, but is it science?”.

Each of these papers can be accessed through the PubMed database by using the PubMed Unique Identifier (PMID) number — for example, 11232061 will locate the paper on dating experiences. But if you want to find, say, all papers published by the J. Smith working on HIV, you need to use additional qualifiers and/or know where the author has worked.

This suggests that the time may be ripe for the introduction of author-specific ID numbers, or AIDs, similar to PMIDs. These could be provided at the time of publication and would form part of any reference database entry, making database searches considerably easier — though perhaps less eclectic.