This article was updated on July 26, 2024.
Research dissemination is one of the core objectives of what scholars do, however consolidating your publications to let the world know about all the articles that belong to you can be a challenge. As unique as we all think we are, our names are not. If your name is Carol Chen, how can you distinguish yourself from the 15+ other Carol Chen’s who publish scholarly literature around the globe? And what about authors who publish with or without a middle name or initial? Or with an entirely different name or surname?
One solution is to register for an ORCID, which stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID. ORCID is an international, interdisciplinary, open, non-proprietary and non-profit organization that “provides a persistent digital identifier (an ORCID iD) that distinguishes you from every other researcher.”
ORCID was created by the research community to address these common issues:
- Disambiguation: allows researchers to distinguish their research activities from others with similar names and affiliations
- Credit and attribution: enables researchers to easily and uniquely associate a researcher’s identity to all their research activities (publications, datasets, equipment, articles, media stories, curated exhibits, experiments, patents etc.)
- Getting found and counted: your populated ORCID record helps you ensure your work is easily discovered by others (funders, employers etc.)
- Managing privacy and identity: empowers researchers to self‐manage their personal privacy whilst preserving the ability for their body of work to be publicly available.
- Administrative burden: this common identifier reduces manual data entry through the automatic exchange of publication information across multiple researcher information systems (such as publishers, funders) e.g from manuscript submission to publication
- Portability: your ORCID iD moves with you, across organizations and national boundaries
You own and control your iD, which you can connect with your professional information — affiliations, grants, publications, peer review and more. You can also use your iD to share your information with other systems, ensuring you get recognition for all your contributions, saving you time and hassle and reducing the risk of errors.
ORICID also connects your research to your affiliation with the University of Alberta, making university research easier to find and ensuring it will be included in analyses done by ranking bodies such as the Times Higher Education World University Rankings.
The University of Alberta is an institutional member of ORCID-CA, which means we can use the member API to populate systems. In a recent analysis done for the College of Natural and Applied Sciences, we found that only 57% of tenure track faculty members have an ORCID Record that A) has been updated with their information and B) contains publicly viewable information. This means that 43% of permanent faculty members in that department may not be identifying their work as theirs or ensuring that it is publicly connected to our institution. Consequently, we are not able to provide everyone with seamless software integration that automates work, such as updating bibliographic databases.
Register for your own free ORCID iD on their website or view detailed instructions on how to register for ORCID iD. Feel free to reach out to thane@ualberta.ca if you have any questions.
About Janice
Janice Kung is a Health Sciences Librarian at the John W. Scott Health Sciences Library at the University of Alberta. Her research interests include systematic review searching and research metrics. As a member of the Research Impact Team, she provides support to the university community on how to effectively convey the research productivity of individual researchers and faculties/departments.
About Thane
Thane Chambers is the Research Impact Librarian for the University of Alberta Library. She works with the Library's Research Impact Team to help the campus better understand its research and its impacts.