AICID: Unique Identifiers for AI Scientists
For the scholarly communication community, this work addresses an emerging integrity problem by proposing infrastructure to track AI authorship, though it is a conceptual proposal without empirical validation.
The paper identifies the lack of a standard mechanism to distinguish AI scientists from human ones in scholarly databases and proposes AICID, a persistent identifier for AI contributors modeled on ORCID, to ensure transparent provenance of AI-generated research.
AI scientists are now a reality, with the ability to generate complete research papers, maintain scholarly profiles, receive citations, and attract peer review invitations. Yet no standard mechanism exists to distinguish an AI scientist from a human one in bibliographic databases, citation indexes, or journal submission systems. This white paper defines the problem, analyzes its consequences for the integrity of scholarly communication, and proposes AICID (AI Contributor IDentifier): a persistent, unique identifier for AI scientists. Modeled on ORCID but designed specifically for non-human contributors, AICID links each AI author to its model identity, version, operator,. Adoption by publishers, preprint servers, and bibliographic databases aims to make the provenance of AI-generated research transparent and machine-readable. We outline the design requirements for such a system, present a prototype, and argue that AICID is necessary infrastructure for a scholarly ecosystem in which AI scientists are already active participants.