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Before asking I searched both on Oxford Dictionary Online and on Wiktionary, but I found no answer to this question, which arose reading a today news article published on The New York Times.

President Giorgio Napolitano began a new round of consultations on Friday to identify a candidate for prime minister who would be able to count on the backing of Italy's fractured political parties and be able to form a government.

Is "identify" a proper word to express the Giorgio Naplitano's activities? Online dictionaries I cited above says no. Reading them it seems that "identify" is a word related to police's work or to one's process of identifying themselves.

If I am right, can anybody suggest a better word for replacing "identify" in the above sentence?

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    Check your ODO definition again: it's the third example in definition 1. It's not a use I particularly care for, but it's common.
    – StoneyB on hiatus
    Commented Mar 29, 2013 at 19:44
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    Very often used this way in biomed and other technical writing. It's tragic how words are thus molested and otherwise abused by novelty-seeking word junkies.
    – user264
    Commented Mar 29, 2013 at 23:53
  • @Stoney, yes, but the fact is that the real meanings of words are often far more complex than the simple online dictionary definitions would lead us to suppose. And I read many times the third example in definition 1, but only after your comment I realized that that definition is the meaning I was looking for. Thank you and congratulations for the great work you are doing here.
    – user114
    Commented Mar 30, 2013 at 10:40

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OP is simply mistaken in his understanding of how identify can be validly used. There's nothing wrong with the cited example, which reflects OED's definition #6...

v. trans. To discover, distinguish, isolate; to locate and recognize, or describe.

The semantics of OP's context strongly imply that a suitable candidate does exist already, but his identity is currently unknown (consultations are simply intended to help discover who he is).

But arguably it could be said to mean the primary purpose of the consultations is to establish the identifying characteristics of "a suitable candidate", following which there might be another round of consultations to decide who best fits the "definition of requirements" thereby identified.

That second possible meaning (identify = establish the defining characteristics of something) might not precisely correspond to any dictionary definition, but to my mind it's the sense intended when people say scientists have identified the Higgs Boson or identified a new species.

Probably a pedant would say my second meaning isn't strictly valid (because no single individual is necessarily and explicitly isolated by the activity), but I've no doubt a skilled politician/orator could easily defend it. If we suppose, for example, that the consultations were part of a strictly-defined parliamentary process that Napolitano was legally obliged to follow, he could argue that their remit was to identify [the defining characteristics of] a suitable candidate, following which he himself could make the actual decision as to which individual best matched that definition.

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One of the meaning given for identify from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary is "to find or discover somebody/something."

In this case, I would say the sentence can be rewritten as follows:

President Giorgio Napolitano began a new round of consultations on Friday to find a candidate for prime minister who would be able to count on the backing of Italy's fractured political parties and be able to form a government.

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At first it sounded OK to me, but as you mention it seems to be an incorrect usage, since the a candidate is not specific.
I referred to the definition here http://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/american/identify

Usage 2. "to recognize as being or show to be the very person or thing known, described, or claimed; fix the identity of ⇒ "to identify a biological specimen"

Maybe you could say

...on Friday to find a candidate...

or

...on Friday to decide on a candidate...

At first I also thought of choose, but that indicates a fixed number/group of candidates to be considered (which may be the case but not specified in this context).

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