ORCID is a researcher identification system. Use your own ORCID to link grants, publications and datasets together. With a unique and persistent identifier (and an associated web services), you can automatically keep your data up to date in many research systems.
There’s the potential for confusion and mistaken identities in scholarly publishing. An ORCID solves this problem. For example, you might want to "disambiguate" yourself from your peers with a researcher identification system. A researcher identifier is a unique and persistent codes. Simply put, these codes identify each academic as an individual researcher and protects everyone’s unique scholarly identities.
Visit ORCID and link your work to your scholarly self
ORCID was founded in 2012 as a non-profit organization comprised of publishers, funders, and institutions like Nature Publishing Group, Welcome Trust, and Cornell University. It is born from an effort to build a global-scale open identifier registry for researchers. Millions of researchers have ORCID IDs so far, and the number continues to grow.
- A researcher identifier helps to ensure that research outputs are correctly attributed.
- They connect researchers with contributions and affiliations.
- They are inter-operable across systems and networks of publishers, funding organizations and research institutions.
- when a website is built around a research identifiers, you can find new connections, find new readers for your work, and track how often your work is being read.
- They can improve discoverability for researchers (and their research output) for funders, publishers and collaborators.
Importantly, these identifiers are institution-agnostic, and remain with a researcher throughout the life of their research.
Here’s how to get started with ORCID.
Step 1. Claim your ORCID in under 30 seconds
Begin at ORCID.org/register and sign up for an ORCID account. At this step in the process, you’ll add very basic information and click “Register”.
If your name is already in the ORCID system, you’ll then be prompted to claim an existing profile or make a new one.
Done! You now have an ORCID identifier.
Now to set up an ORCID profile.
Step 2. Edit you ORCID profile
Next, you’ll type or copy and paste your ORCID profile so that others can verify who you are, and also learn more about you. Here’s what you will be able to add soon (if you have not got this already:
- Links to LinkedIn, your website, and your other profiles on the web
- ORCid
- Links to your Google Scholar and LinkedIn profiles, your personal website, and any other websites where you’ve got a scholarly profile.
On the left-hand menu on your main profile page, click the pencil “Edit” icon next to “Websites.”
In the fields that appear, add links to your LinkedIn, Google Scholar, and other professional profiles you’ve created so far. Also add a link to your website. Describe each link adequately enough so your profile’s viewers know if they’re going to click a Google Scholar link vs. a ResearchGate link, and so on. Click “Save changes” when you’re done.
Import your publications by connecting other scholarly identifiers
Any type of scholarly output you create, ORCID can handle.Are you a traditional scientist, who writes only papers and the occasional book chapter? ORCID can track ‘em. Are you instead a cutting-edge computational biologist who releases datasets and figures for your thesis, as they are created? ORCID can track that, too.
Not a scientist at all, but an art professor? You can import your works using ORCID, as well. ORCID will even start importing information about your service to your discipline soon!
To connect to other identifiers and indices, from your main profile page, scroll down to the “Works” section and click the “Link Works” button. Then you’ll be prompted to connect to the services of your choice.
Done! You now have an ORCID profile.
Your works will be imported automatically to ORCID. If you’ve connected another scholarly identifier like your Scopus Author ID, a link will appear in your lefthand menu bar.
Step 3 Complete your personal information
Finally, add your education credentials and employment history that might not have imported when you connected other services.
Under each section, click the “Add Manually” button, fill out as much descriptive information as you’re comfortable sharing, choose the level of privacy you’d prefer under the “Who can see this?” section in the upper right of the pop-up box, and then click “Add to list” to commit it to your profile.
Step 4. Complete your publication record
It’s possible that not all of your publications and other works will have imported. You can add them in three ways:
- Manually by clicking the “Add Work Manually” button under your Works section and adding the publications one-by-one
- Importing works from your Mendeley profile using theMendeley2ORCID service. Just login with your ORCID ID in the top-right corner of the screen, approve a sync with Mendeley, and your works will be imported to ORCID.
- Batch import your works using the new BibTeX import button. You can export your works from Mendeley, EndNote, and many other reference management services in BibTeX format, then click the “Link BibTeX” button under the Works section of your profile, upload your BibTeX file, and you’re done!
If any duplicate records were imported with the Mendeley sync or BibTeX import, you can delete them by clicking the trashcan icon next to the duplicate work’s title.
Step 5. Connect ORCID to the rest of your online life
You can connect your ORCID account with websites including Web of Science, Figshare, and Impactstory, among many others. Once they’re connected, you can easily push information back and forth between services–meaning that a complete ORCID record will allow you to automatically import the same information to multiple places, rather than having to enter the same information over and over again on different websites.
And new services are connecting to ORCID every day, sharing information across an increasing number of platforms–repositories, funding agencies, and more!
Limitations
ORCID is still a relatively basic service. You cannot edit incorrect entries, automatically detect and remove duplicates, or export your profile information in BibTeX, JSON-LD, or other researcher-friendly formats.
ORCID also has gaps in its coverage. It doesn’t find all of your publications, all of the time, and connectable third-party services like Scopus don’t always, either.
That means you might have to manually add some works and information to your profile, same as you do for ResearchGate, Google Scholar, and all other scholarly profiles.
References
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