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What is ORCID?

Researchers and scholars face the ongoing challenge of distinguishing scholarly activities from those of others with similar names. They need to be able to easily and uniquely attach their identity to scholarly work, such as articles, citations, grants, patents and datasets. As individuals collaborate across disciplines and institutions, they must interact with an increasing number and diversity of information systems. Entering data over and over again can be time-consuming, and often frustrating. ORCID is an open, non-profit, community-based effort to reduce that frustration.

ORCID provides a registry of unique researcher identifiers and a transparent method of linking research activities and outputs to these identifiers. An ORCID iD is a persistent unique identifier that follows an individual throughout their career, and looks something like “0000-0003-0423-208X.”

ORCID records hold non-sensitive information such as name, email, organization, and activities such as publication, grants, patents and other scholarly works. ORCID provides tools for individuals to manage data privacy.

Visit What is ORCID for additional information.

Why get an ORCID identifier?

Benefits of getting an ORCID iD include:

  • Ensuring researchers get credit for their work
  • Reducing time to identify scholarly output (see "publisher integration", below)
  • Enabling scholars to keep track of and report on their work with funders, publishers and institutions
  • Repurposing data for use in CV generation, citation repositories, Profiles, annual reports, faculty web-sites, and other systems (see "grant submission integration", below)
  • Tying individuals to their scholarly work should make finding academic papers easier and more accurate

Publisher integration: Elsevier, Thomson Reuters, Nature and other major publishers have begun integrating ORCID iDs into the manuscript submission process, and embedding ORCID identifiers across their scientific and scholarly research ecosystem. This will save authors time during submission, and enable automatic updating of author bibliographies when articles are published.

Grant submission integration: NIH, NSF and other US federal agencies are planning to integrate ORCID iDs into the ScienCV platform, for linking researchers, their grants, and their scientific output. The US federal government has been working to create a fed-wide profile system to streamline the grants and contract application process and reduce the data entry burden for investigators, and ORCID holds promise to be part of the solution. Some Canadian federal funding agencies (CIHR, NSERC) allow applicants to put their ORCID in the applications.

Register for an ORCID iD