Persistent what? A researcher's confusion

For a long time, the proliferation of identifiers linked to one's research outputs or profile added to rather than reduced the research community's confusion. Having lived in China for close to a decade, at an early stage I was keenly aware of the need for name disambiguation among Asian scientific communities. Combined with my active editorial role of one of the main journals in my discipline, I soon took an interest in the development of PIDs, with particular emphasis on ORCID and Scopus IDs. Yet, even though I volunteered to promote ORCID as country ambassador and later joined the ORCID Board, the penny only dropped after my move to Australia in early 2018. PIDs have only recently become useful to me, because they are now mandated by the Australian Research Council in their grant application process. Nevertheless, I anticipate additional positive developments.