ORCID is a nonprofit organization helping create a world in which all who participate in research, scholarship and innovation are uniquely identified and connected to their contributions and affiliations, across disciplines, borders, and time.
Essentially, an ORCID iD (Open Researcher and Contributor iDentifier) is a number that identifies you as a researcher and author. It provides a profile page where you can link papers or presentations on which you are an author, helping other researchers find who you are and what you've published directly from a single paper of yours.
You can use ORCID while searching literature to find a concise, and hopefully complete, list of an author's publications.
All you'll need to make your own ORCiD is a version of your name (you don't have to choose how your name will look in publications yet), an email, and a password. You don't have to connect any publications yet, you can even make your iD private so only you can see it until you're ready, and you can have different privacy settings for each piece of information on the page.
When you're ready to make your ORCID iD, be sure to make an institutional account. This allows you sign in with your UC 6+2 and allows you to connect with other research support systems. Don't worry, you can associate as many email addresses with your ORCID iD as you want, so definitely add a personal email address so you don't lose access to your ORCiD upon graduation.
Here's how:
If you've already got an ORCID iD, you can still connect it to your UC 6+2 login (and have one fewer passwords to remember)! Simply make sure your UC email address is listed under your ORCiD (it doesn't have to be made public). If you used a different email, you can go to your ORCID iD page and click the little pencil (edit) icon above your email address to add as many email addresses as you'd like. Once your UC email address is in your ORCiD profile, you can click institutional account on the sign in page. Once you sign in with your UC 6+2, it'll bring you to your ORCiD sign in, where you'll need to enter an associated email address and your ORCiD password. From then on, you have a one-step sign in option to log into ORCiD with your UC 6+2.
Short answer: YES!
And make one now, even before you pursue publication.
ORCID iD is an easy solution to many common worries around publishing:
It connects all your papers, even if you publish under a different name.
If you're good about connecting everything to ORCiD, it can serve as an open access, constantly updated "digital curriculum vitae." Now, many publishers and some grant-making bodies (including the Royal Society, American Geophysical Union, Science, Nature, Wiley, American Chemical Society) require some or all authors in their journals to have an ORCID iD.
Your ORCID iD is like a profile for you as a researcher, and it comes with a unique 16 digit number identifier, like a DOI but for a person.
Once directed to your page (sample profile linked below), people can see whatever you've decided to share. Most people will include an institutional email address and education, but the most important part of your iD is your publications.
You can provide your ORCiD anytime you appear as an author on a publication, and the paper will contain a link to your iD. This allows people who are interested in your paper to see what else you've published and gets rid of ambiguity when researchers share the same or similar names.
The following is an example of a paper (published by a UC professor!) with some authors having linked ORCID iDs.
The green circles above link to the Author Information at the end of the article (below), where the authors are listed followed by their ORCID iD numbers so they can easily be looked up even if the paper is printed.
Below is an example of what an ORCiD iD landing page looks like, using that of Dr. Anna Gudmundsdottir, Chemistry Professor at University of Cincinnati.
All you'll need to make your own ORCiD is a version of your name (you don't have to choose how your name will look in publications yet), an email (use institutional sign in to connect with UC), and a password. You don't have to connect any publications yet, and you can even make your iD private so only you can see it until you're ready, and you can have different privacy settings for each piece of information on the page.
When you're ready to make your ORCID iD, be sure to make an institutional account. This allows you sign in with your UC 6+2, and allows UC to connect with its current and former students and faculty! Don't worry, you can associate as many email addresses with your ORCID iD as you want, so definitely add a personal email address so you don't lose access to your ORCiD upon graduation.
Here's how:
If you've already got an ORCID iD, you can still connect it to your UC 6+2 login (and have one fewer passwords to remember)! Simply make sure your UC email address is listed under your ORCiD (it doesn't have to be made public). If you used a different email, you can go to your ORCID iD page and click the little pencil (edit) icon above your email address to add as many email addresses as you'd like. Once your UC email address is in your ORCiD profile, you can click institutional account on the sign in page. Once you sign in with your UC 6+2, it'll bring you to your ORCiD sign in, where you'll need to enter an associated email address and your ORCiD password. From then on, you have a one-step sign in option to log into ORCiD with your UC 6+2.
Now that you've got an ORCID iD, you can start filling it out.
If you have a LinkedIn profile (PS: you should!), a professional Twitter account, and/or your advisor's research group website, you can add these as links in the left column of your iD to make it easier for people to find your professional presence online, all in one place.
A good first step is to create your Scholar@UC account here and connect it to your ORCiD to allow UC to post your employment, degrees, and any publications you already have in Scholar. Scholar@UC is the digital repository for UC. It is where you can upload raw research data after publication if required by funding agencies, and any research capstone, thesis, or dissertation will likely end up on Scholar.
If you already have any publications you can add them directly with the DOI, but you can also set up your ORCiD to automatically update with accepted publications by connecting to CrossRef, DataCite, Scopus, and NCBI.
CrossRef is a nonprofit organization that works on the backend of scholarly literature, helping to make publications more searchable. It allows you to search for scholarly works by title, author, DOI, ORCID iD, and more. More important are the ways it can support you as a researcher. As most publications will end up searchable on CrossRef, including your ORCID iD number anytime you submit a publication will help CrossRef find it and suggest its addition to your ORCiD profile. You can even set up an auto-update to have your ORCiD automatically update with any publications that you submitted with your iD.
DataCite is a nonprofit organization that assigns DOIs to research data and other research outputs. You can sign in to DataCite with your ORCiD login both to create a profile on DataCite (or link a preexisting profile) and to allow your ORCiD to automatically update with datasets and publications that are associated with your iD (video tutorial).
Scopus is a service provided by the publishing company Elsevier, which enables searching for scientific works, authors, affiliations, and more. As it is a paid service, you'll have to login through UC to use it, but from there it will connect and export to Mendeley, Pure, and SciVal. Once you have a publication, you should be able to connect your author profile page to your ORCID iD, though the process is a bit more involved (instructions).
NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) is provided by the US National Institute of Health (NIH), and is an effective research tool that enables searching scientific works, proteins, genes, and other data sets. NCBI also encompasses the popular PubMed, PubChem, and BLAST search engines. You can use it without logging in, but you can also create a login through UC. This will enable you to save sources and searches, but it will also allow you to connect to your ORCiD so that you can import ORCiD's information and create a CV via SciENcv for use in NIH-sponsored grant proposals without reentering all of your information and publications each time.
Now that you've got an ORCID iD, make sure you let everyone know!
For these, including LinkedIn, you won't be able to officially associate your ORCID iD. However, you can still display and link your iD as shown below. For poster presentations, the best idea is to include a QR code in the corner that can link to your ORCID iD.
The standard format for linking your ORCID iD is with a hyperlinked icon the same height as your text, followed by your ORCID iD link, also hyperlinked. If you can't include the icon, the preferred format is to include the entire URL for your iD. Seen less often is a hyperlinked green circle icon followed by the name and the hyperlinked ORCID iD number.
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5420-4098
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5420-4098
Anna D. Gudmundsdottir: 0000-0002-5452-4098
Include your ORCID iD any time you submit for publication to ensure your ORCiD is linked directly from the paper and your publication appears in your iD. Usually, including your ORCID iD number or URL in the manuscript is not sufficient, for example the American Chemical Society will not include ORCID iDs in publications unless the iD has been added to the author's ACS account and verified. Always check your specific journal or publishing agency for any extra steps before submitting a publication.
Get FundedORCiD's mantra is "enter once, reuse often." To support this ideal they have an expansive list of members, many of which are funding organizations who allow applicants to access pre-filled forms simply by connecting their ORCID iD. Make sure to connect your ORCID iD to your NCBI login so you can easily create your NIH BioSketch before you apply for any NIH-funded grants. Save time by not re-entering your entire CV into form after form each time you apply for a grant.
