Understanding ORCID

Last updated on 2025-01-29 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

  • How can having an ORCID benefit scholars through practicing open science?

Objectives

  • Describe author disambiguation and why it matters (makes your work Findable)
  • List the range of scholarly outputs you can track (makes your work Accessible)
  • Introduce systems where ORCID can be integrated (makes your record Interoperable)
  • Understand how ORCID is institution agnostic (makes your record Reusable)

ORCID as Open Science

When an ORCID record is populated and shared publicly, it becomes a powerful mechanism for structural change in scholarly communication. Benefits to scholars accumulate over the course of their careers, and what initially might look like one more account with the same information as their CV can actually free them from tedious, repetitive tasks. The more an ORCID is understood as a tool for making scholarly online presence robust and persistent, the more valuable it becomes to each scholar. Open science advances as the scholarly community collectively experiences these benefits.

In this lesson we will look at the major benefits of maximizing an ORCID’s effectiveness, with the purpose of forming concepts to support advocacy and promotion within our institutional communities.

Author Disambiguation

As the number of scholars publishing work increases, the problem of telling authors apart from each other becomes more important to solve. When only internal or proprietary systems hold authoritative metadata that is verified by the authors, librarians, or other trusted parties, the value of their work is diminished. Especially as scholars move from institution to institution, and affiliations are listed in a variety of ways, records become harder to track. Databases which aggregate journals may not be able to accurately distinguish among many authors with the same name. Departments may not be able to track their publishing activity. Researchers working in adjacent areas may not find each other to collaborate. Recruiters may not be aware of the full scope of a researcher’s contribution to their field.

An ORCID disambiguates among scholars with similar or identical names by assigning one persistent, unique identifier per person. Each identifier is a string of numbers generated and stored by ORCID. This identifier serves as the focal point of other relevant information such as affiliation and scholarly works. Scholarly works become more findable when a person is matched with an ORCID.

RANDOM NAMES, REAL AUTHORS?

  1. Use Namey to generate a random name: https://namey.muffinlabs.com/
  2. Enter this name into ORCID’s search box: https://orcid.org/
  3. Put quotes around the text so that it is read as a string
  4. Hit enter. How many results did you get?

Try doing this with your own name, or the name of a colleague. Identical names can appear to be the same person, but ORCID gives researchers a persistent Unique Identifier (UID) that keeps them distinctive in any system that integrates it.

QUESTIONS:

  • Do people at your institution use more than one term or set of terms to refer to their place of employment, their unit or department?
  • How many variations of listing your institutional affiliation have you seen?
  • Is there a standard way of listing affiliation at your institution?

NAME CHANGES

What are some reasons an author might want to edit how their name appears in connection with their publications?

  • Co-authors might submit your name in a way you do not prefer
  • Your legal name may change over time
  • Branding: a standard name standardizes your scholarly publishing online presence

Range of Scholarly Products

Different institutions and systems ask for scholarly works to be presented in different formats. The way scholarly works are grouped may differ according to information organization decisions made by an enterprise software provider, or a policy-maker responding to institutional priorities. This discourages diversity in scholarly production because it does not allow exploration or development of emerging formats. It also may overlook established discipline-specific forms of scholarly works. Subscription-based databases, as well as openly accessible databases like PubMedCentral, and webcrawlers like Google Scholar, are all only as complete as the records of scholarly works that have been created, and many systems do not allow the full range of scholarly works to be tracked or recorded.

ORCID records can minimize time spent on repetitive tasks through automatic updates. They can also be a tool for creating a complete record of scholarly works through manual addition of more uncommon scholarly products. There are more than 40 types of works available to choose when adding a work to an ORCID profile.

ORCID Record Scholarly Work Categories:

Scholarly Works

QUESTIONS:

  • Are there any categories which are new to you, when conceptualizing what counts as a scholarly product?
  • Is there a category you would like to see added?
  • Does a work that you have not added to your CV or institutional tracking system match up with an ORCID category?

Putting the records of an author’s scholarly products in one place that persists across systems helps make their work accessible. As more systems integrate ORCID, it also streamlines access to the full scope of scholarship that has been done. If you find one work by an author, you can quickly find their other works.

Integrations

As a standalone system, an ORCID is not necessarily more valuable than any other scholarly identifier. Because it can both integrate and be integrated into other systems, an ORCID can serve as a key to access a scholarly presence controlled by the scholar. Additionally, librarians or other trusted parties can be added to profiles so that things like standardized affiliations can be curated. Many other systems which track publications have integrated ORCIDs.

An ORCID that is connected to other systems makes author identification interoperable. A link to an ORCID record in a publication, repository, or Research Information Management System (RIMS) can validate that the correct person has been associated with a work they actually authored.

Minimize Repetitive Tasks

By connecting to some of the major publication tracking systems, scholars can minimize the time they spend entering the same information about their published works over and over in different systems, draining cognitive resources that could be assigned to higher value tasks. Fewer cases of repetitive data entry make errors less likely, and provide a validated version of a scholarly record.

When librarians are added to ORCID records as trusted parties, or when Research Information Management Systems (RIMS) are connected to populate ORCID records as sholars add information to their institutional-level recporting systems, ORCID makes this data reusable. It can be verified by other tracking systems, and centralize a persistent record of a scholar’s work. Because an ORCID is institution-agnostic, it will follow the scholar when they change institutional affiliation. We will look at how to connect some of these systems in the next episode.

WHAT DOES INTEGRATION INTO A RIMS LOOK LIKE?

  • A researcher goes to a home page for an institution’s ORCID integration
  • They log in to their institution’s system with their institutional credentials
  • They log in to ORCID with their ORCID credentials
  • They see a window pop up that asks them to authorize access between their ORCID and institutional system
  • They see a confirmation that the authorization is successful

Behind the scenes, an institution’s IT department will need to configure the logins before this can work. This kind of integration can also be developed further so that works from ORCID records push back out to researcher profile pages in institutional systems.

Key Points

  • The value of an ORCID goes up over the course of a scholar’s career
  • Connecting an ORCID to other systems maximizes its benefit to scholarly online presence
  • ORCID records help make scholarship FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable)