Your Scholarly Identity (ORCID)

Researcher identifiers allow for disambiguation among researchers with the same or similar names. Think of them as digital object identifiers (DOIs) for scholars: persistent, unique, with the ability to be integrated and linked throughout the academic publishing ecosystem.

Common identifiers include ResearcherID, used in Web of Science, and the Scopus Author ID, used in conjunction with Elsevier products. The problem with using these types of identifiers is that they are proprietary to a particular platform or product. To simplify how you are identified in the scholarly literature corpus across all systems, we recommend signing up for an identifier from the Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) organization.

ORCID provides each researcher with a free, unique 16-digit number, referred to as an ORCID iD. The ORCID iD (sometimes just called an “ORCID”) not only distinguishes scholars from one another, it connects a scholar's research activities across funders, research organizations, publishers, universities, professional associations, and repositories. You can view more detail by viewing this linked video.

This guide explains how to set up and populate your ORCID profile. More information specific ORCID integrations and helpful use cases is forthcoming!