The problem
It won't take very much exposure to publications data to realize that many publications do not adequately identify authors. Many publishers and publications databases such as PubMed are improving their handling of author names to include more than the last name plus first initial of authors, but many names are very common and there certainly exist many examples of authors with identical last names, first names, and middle initials who publish in the same discipline.
The ORCID initiative offers great promise for improving our abilities to carry identifiers throughout the publishing system – from the point of article submission forward – but is just in its infancy.
For the foreseeable future any VIVO installation will have to have a strategy for managing publication authorship when it won't be clear whether two apparently identical instances of the same author string listed on two publications in fact reference the same person.
The recommended strategy for handling authors is detailed on the page entitled Why should we create VCard entities linked to Authorships?
