ORCID

ORCID, which stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID, provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researchers and supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognized.

Why should you get an ORCID iD?

ORCID is an international, interdisciplinary, open, non-proprietary, and not-for-profit organization 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.)
  • Get found, get counted: your populated ORCID record helps you ensure your work is easily discovered by others (funders, employers etc.)
  • Manage privacy and identity: empowers researchers to self-manage their personal privacy whilst preserving the ability for their body of work to be publicly available.
  • Reduce 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
  • Portable: your ORCID iD moves with you, across organizations and national boundaries.

Unlike other research identifiers, ORCID is universal and works across a variety of different platforms.

You can get set yourself up with an ORCID iD in 2 easy steps:

  1. Register. Registration is free and takes about 30 seconds.
  2. Set up your profile. Once you've registered, you can add information about your scholarly record and achievements. This will ensure that you are associated with your work. Much of this data input can be automated. Our guide Making the Most of ORCID will walk you through the steps to add your scholarly works to your profile. Also, don't forget to sync your ORCID with your author profiles in Scopus and Web of Science. Instructions for both databases are in the guide.

Too busy to do all of this yourself?

You can grant a delegate access to your ORCID records, and they can update and manage records on your behalf. Note that delegates must have their own ORCID ID to log in. You can add a trusted individual to your account settings.

If you require help or have any questions about registering for or maintaining an ORCID record, please contact your subject librarian.

ORCID API

The University of Alberta is an institutional member of ORCID-CA. This means that we can use the member API to populate systems.

This allows our university community to reuse information available from ORCID. An example of this is available on the University of Alberta Chemistry's website, where recent department publications are highlighted on the right-hand side of the page.

API access also means that it is possible to automatically add information to the ORCID records of researchers who have granted permissions.

If you are interested in learning more about the API and how it can be accessed or used, please contact Thane Chambers at thane@ualberta.ca