Finding everything one researcher has published, or everything one journal has printed on a subject, sounds like a single search. It rarely is. Names are shared and spelt several ways, and journals rename themselves and go by abbreviations. The reliable route is an identifier first and a name second: an ORCID iD for a person, a journal's full title or ISSN for a journal.
EdCitation publishes this guide. Every rule in it was read on the service's own help pages on 27 September 2026, and every search result quoted comes from runs we made that day.
Two of the steps are ones EdCitation does free, with no account. Find sources has an Author filter that takes a name or an ORCID iD and a Journal filter that takes a journal's title, and Cite a source turns each paper you keep into a reference from the publisher's record.
When do you need everything by one author?
You need an author's whole output when that person's work is a thread your paper has to follow. Three cases come up again and again.
- A literature review. When one researcher keeps turning up in reference lists, read the rest of their work: later papers often correct or narrow earlier ones. Pair author searches with the citation chaining in how to find sources for a literature review fast.
- Following a debate. Replies and rebuttals tend to come from the same few people in the same few journals. Searching each name, and the journal where the exchange ran, lays the conversation out in order.
- Checking a supervisor's or examiner's work. Before a first meeting or a viva, read what the person has actually published, not a department page last updated years ago.
Journals matter in the same way. A brief may ask for sources from named journals, and anyone choosing where to submit reads a journal's recent issues first, as how to choose a journal explains.
What is an ORCID iD, and how do I search with one?
An ORCID iD is a free, persistent identifier for one researcher: a 16-digit number with a record attached that links the person to their work (ORCID, n.d.-b). ORCID is a not-for-profit organisation paid for by fees from its member organisations, and one of its founding principles is that researchers can create, edit and keep an iD and record without charge (ORCID, n.d.-a). The record can hold works, funding, peer review and employment, and its owner decides what is public.
The iD is written in four groups of four digits. Jennifer Doudna's, which we use below, is 0000-0001-9161-999X: the final character can be an X.
An ORCID search, done well, has three steps:
- Find the iD: on the person's university page, a journal's author information, their Google Scholar profile, or the search box at orcid.org.
- Open the record and read its Works section, the author's own list.
- Search an index by the iD, not the name, for papers the record lacks.
Why the same iD gives three different counts
We looked Doudna's iD up in three places on 27 September 2026. Her ORCID record, last changed on 17 September 2026, listed 528 works. Crossref's API found 181 records carrying the iD. OpenAlex's author profile tied to the same iD counted 698 works. None is wrong; each counts something different.
An ORCID record holds what the researcher, or a service they have allowed to write to it, has added. Crossref holds an iD only when the publisher deposits it: Crossref (2026) asks members to include an author's iD "whenever possible", which also lets the author's ORCID record update automatically. Older papers often carry none. OpenAlex builds its profiles from its own matching, described below, so it can gather papers with no iD attached.
Why is searching by an author's name so unreliable?
A name is not an identity. Different people share one, and one person publishes under several: with and without a middle initial, before and after a change of surname, and in transliterations that differ from journal to journal. Deciding which papers belong to which real person is called author disambiguation, and every index handles it in its own way.
How OpenAlex decides who wrote what
OpenAlex (2026b) says its model weighs six signals: name similarity, co-authors, institutions, research topics, citation patterns and ORCID. It names the two ways this fails, one person's work split across several profiles and different people merged into one, and warns that ORCID iDs are on far fewer papers than people assume and are not added to older ones after the fact. Each paper also keeps the author's name exactly as printed, before any matching (OpenAlex, 2026a).
How Crossref records authors
Crossref stores what the publisher sends: a surname, which is required, given names, the order of the authors and, where supplied, the ORCID iD (Crossref, 2026). Its guidance describes no matching of names to people, so a name search there is a search of text.
What a common name does to a search
We searched machine learning in Find sources with the Author filter set to Wei Wang, a name many researchers share. It returned 32,460 results. Of the first 30, only five showed an author called exactly Wei Wang among the names listed. The second was by Xiao-Wei Wang, and the sixth, "Edge Computing with Artificial Intelligence: A Machine Learning Perspective", had a Tonghe Wang and a Wei Li but no Wei Wang, which we confirmed on its OpenAlex record. A typed name is matched word by word against the names printed on each paper, so for a common name, use the ORCID iD.
How do I search by author in Google Scholar?
Type author: before the name, in quotation marks for more than one word; Google's help page gives author:"d knuth" as its example, and its advanced search can also limit by author, publication and date (Google, n.d.-b). If the author has a profile, it appears at the top of the results.
A Google Scholar profile is made and kept by the author. Google (n.d.-a) says a profile stays private until its owner makes it public, and appears in search results only when it is public and has a verified email address at an institution. The owner can add, delete, edit and merge its articles, and can accept updates automatically or review them first. That makes a profile a strong list but not a complete or certain one.
To follow an author, open the profile, press Follow and choose "New articles by this author". For an author without a profile, run an author: search and set an alert from the envelope in the sidebar (Google, n.d.-b).
How do I find articles in a specific journal?
Search by the journal's full title, then confirm it is the journal you mean, because titles are shared, abbreviated and changed. The ISSN settles any doubt.
What an ISSN tells you
An ISSN is an eight-digit code, two groups of four joined by a hyphen, that identifies a serial such as a journal in any medium; its last digit is a check digit and can be an X (ISSN International Centre, n.d.-b). It identifies the publication, not its quality or contents. Print and online editions get separate ISSNs, and a significant change, such as a new title, brings a new one. The Lancet's print ISSN is 0140-6736 and its online ISSN 1474-547X, and the ISSN Portal also lists an earlier, cancelled ISSN for it (ISSN International Centre, n.d.-a). When two journals share a name, the ISSN printed on the article tells you which one you have.
Back issues and tables of contents
Every journal's website keeps an archive of its issues, each with its table of contents, back to the first one the publisher has put online. Browsing it is slow and complete; searching inside the site is quick and returns only what matches your words.
Alerts, so the next issue comes to you
A table of contents alert emails you each new issue. On ScienceDirect, Elsevier (2026) says to open the journal's home page and choose the alert under Articles & Issues. An account is needed, because alerts go to its email address, and an alert is sent only once the whole issue is published, so an issue still in progress triggers nothing. Other publishers offer the same on the journal's page; their own help pages give the steps.
Which tool does which job?
Use the source that answers your exact question, then cover its gaps with a second one.
| Task | Where to do it | What to watch for | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| The author's own list | Their ORCID record | Only what they, or a service they allowed, added | ORCID (n.d.-b) |
| Every indexed paper by one person | An OpenAlex author profile, or Find sources with the iD | Split or merged profiles; no iD on older papers | OpenAlex (2026b) |
| Papers carrying a given iD | Crossref | Only where the publisher deposited the iD | Crossref (2026) |
| One author's papers on a topic | EdCitation's Find sources, Author filter | A topic is required; a name matches word by word | Our runs |
| A self-kept list, with alerts | Google Scholar profile | Kept by its owner; may miss or add papers | Google (n.d.-a) |
| One journal's articles on a topic | Find sources, Journal filter | Type the full title, not an abbreviation or ISSN | Our runs |
| Which journal you have | ISSN Portal | Print and online editions have different ISSNs | ISSN International Centre (n.d.-a, n.d.-b) |
| Every new issue | The publisher's table of contents alert | Sent once the whole issue is out | Elsevier (2026) |
How do the Author and Journal filters in Find sources work?
EdCitation's Find sources is the quickest answer to the narrower question most students actually have: what has this person, or this journal, published on my topic? It searches about 300 million published works, and both filters sit in its panel beside kind of source, years and open access. It is free, with no account, and it returns only published records: it looks sources up and never writes one, which a chatbot's list of papers "by" someone cannot promise. Every search needs a topic of at least three characters; the filters narrow that topic rather than replace it.
Author: a name, or an ORCID iD
The box reads "Name or ORCID iD". An iD typed in its usual form, four groups of four with hyphens, is matched to the papers linked to it in the index; anything else is matched against the names printed on each paper.
On 27 September 2026 we searched CRISPR with the Author filter set to Jennifer Doudna: 352 results, provider OpenAlex. First came "The new frontier of genome engineering with CRISPR-Cas9" (Doudna and Charpentier, Science, 2014, cited by 7,197), then "Repurposing CRISPR as an RNA-Guided Platform for Sequence-Specific Control of Gene Expression" (Qi and colleagues, Cell, 2013, 5,300), then a 2018 Science paper by Chen and colleagues on Cas12a (4,638). With her iD, 0000-0001-9161-999X, in place of the name, the search also returned 352, led by the same three.
The run also showed what the topic word does. Doudna's most cited paper, the 2012 Science report of "A Programmable Dual-RNA–Guided DNA Endonuclease in Adaptive Bacterial Immunity", was not among the 352, even sorted by Most cited. Searched in its own words with the same filter, it came first of 105, cited 17,801 times. Try several topic words for one author, as the most cited papers of all time found with Lowry's protein assay.
Journal: the full title, matched to one journal
The Journal box takes a title and picks the index's closest journal for it. The panel then says "Showing" with the journal it chose, or "No journal by that name" with no results, rather than quietly searching everything.
malaria vaccine with The Lancet returned 732 results, provider OpenAlex, under "Showing The Lancet". The first was the 2015 final results of the RTS,S/AS01 phase 3 trial (cited by 1,532), a paper credited to a group rather than to named people: from its DOI, Cite a source gives the in-text citation (RTS,S Clinical Trials Partnership, 2015). The second was "Malaria vaccine developments" (Moorthy, Good and Hill, 2004). Nature matched Nature rather than a sister title, and NEJM matched the New England Journal of Medicine. The abbreviation J Adv Nurs and the ISSN 0140-6736 each came back "No journal by that name". The full title, Journal of Advanced Nursing, returned 2,797 results for nurse staffing, led by Griffiths and colleagues' 2018 systematic review of nurse staffing and omissions in nursing care (cited by 640).
When the main index is busy, a back-up index answers, and there the name and title rank the results rather than exclude others, so read the byline and journal of each record.
Citing what you find
Every result has a Cite button. Given the DOI 10.1126/science.1258096, Cite a source read Crossref's record, reported no retraction, and returned in APA 7:
Doudna, J. A., & Charpentier, E. (2014). The new frontier of genome engineering with CRISPR-Cas9. Science, 346(6213), Article 1258096. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1258096
The title is in sentence case with CRISPR-Cas9 kept as written, and the article number stands in for page numbers, as APA asks; the citation in the text is (Doudna & Charpentier, 2014). Each step is a lookup: EdCitation never writes any part of your work, so the reading and the argument stay yours. When the draft is finished, Verify references checks the whole list free, and References from a file, in Pro at $8 a month, also matches every in-text citation to its entry.
How do I build a complete list of one author's work?
Combine the sources, because each one misses something.
- Find the ORCID iD and copy the record's Works list.
- Open the author's OpenAlex or Google Scholar profile and add what the ORCID record lacks.
- Search Find sources with the iD in the Author filter, under two or three topic words, for papers both lists missed.
- Test each doubtful paper: same institution, co-authors and subject? If not, it is probably a namesake's.
- Search the name for early papers from before the iD existed, and match each by its co-authors.
- Set a Google Scholar "New articles" alert, or a saved search, for what comes next.
- Cite each paper you use from its DOI in Cite a source, then check the finished list.
If you claim to have read all of someone's work, say where you looked and when: these lists change weekly. How old those papers may be is covered in how recent your sources should be.
Quick questions
How do I find all papers by an author?
Start from the author's ORCID record, add what their OpenAlex or Google Scholar profile shows, and search indexes by the iD rather than the name. No single list is complete, so record where you looked.
How do I search by author in Google Scholar?
Type author: and the name in quotation marks, such as author:"d knuth", or use advanced search. If the author keeps a profile, it appears above the results and can be followed for new articles.
What is author disambiguation?
Author disambiguation is deciding which papers belong to which real person when names are shared or vary. OpenAlex weighs names, co-authors, institutions, topics, citations and ORCID iDs, and says it can still split one person or merge two.
Can I search one journal for a topic?
Yes. In EdCitation's free Find sources, type the topic, then the journal's full title in the Journal filter; the panel shows which journal it matched. An abbreviation or an ISSN returns "No journal by that name".
How do I get a journal's new issues by email?
Set a table of contents alert on the journal's page at its publisher. On ScienceDirect this needs an account, and the email arrives once the whole issue is published.
References
- Crossref. (2026, July 1). Contributors. https://www.crossref.org/documentation/schema-library/markup-guide-metadata-segments/contributors/
- Doudna, J. A., & Charpentier, E. (2014). The new frontier of genome engineering with CRISPR-Cas9. Science, 346(6213), Article 1258096. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1258096
- Elsevier. (2026, March 2). How do I set up and manage my alerts? ScienceDirect Support Center. https://www.elsevier.support/sciencedirect/answer/how-do-i-set-up-and-manage-my-alerts
- Google. (n.d.-a). Google Scholar profiles. https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/citations.html
- Google. (n.d.-b). Google Scholar search help. https://scholar.google.com/intl/en/scholar/help.html
- ISSN International Centre. (n.d.-a). The lancet [ISSN record 0140-6736]. ISSN Portal. https://portal.issn.org/resource/ISSN/0140-6736
- ISSN International Centre. (n.d.-b). What is an ISSN? https://www.issn.org/understanding-the-issn/what-is-an-issn/
- OpenAlex. (2026a, September 23). Authorships. OpenAlex Help Center. https://help.openalex.org/data/authorships/
- OpenAlex. (2026b, August 19). Disambiguation: Authors. OpenAlex Help Center. https://help.openalex.org/data/authors/disambiguation/
- ORCID. (n.d.-a). About ORCID. https://info.orcid.org/what-is-orcid/
- ORCID. (n.d.-b). ORCID for researchers. https://info.orcid.org/researchers/