Grow Your ORCiD Profile

Abstract

Do you have an ORCiD profile? You should. Do you know about ORCiD? If not, I suggest you investigate. ORCiD is the Open Researcher and Contributor ID and it provides you with a unique, personalized online profile where you can list publications and research grants and other legitimate academic outputs including blogs. The important aspect of ORCiD is that the information there can be verified; DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) and URL (Uniform Resource Locator) links to articles are provided. For most major research grant funding bodies, a link can be provided whereby the grant could be verified if necessary. ORCiD provides you with a unique number that will follow you for the remainder of your career—and, in fact, beyond (even beyond your life)—and it can also be linked to Web of Science and your ResearcherID profile and Scopus so that citations and h-index can be checked. One incidental advantage of an ORCiD profile is that it survives name changes—for example, marriage or gender realignment—and it is a great bonus for people from regions where many people have the same name; for example, in the Far East and Middle East. One recent development is the capacity to download a QR code which can be copied and pasted into CVs and PowerPoint® presentations. If you are not convinced so far and not already creating your own ORCiD profile, then read on. In addition to the benefits of having an ORCiD profile, such as a verifiable and portable list of achievements, ORCiD may soon be a common and, indeed, compulsory feature of grant applications, manuscript submissions, and promotion procedures. Already, leading publishers are requesting that you provide your ORCiD number when you create a profile on their online submission systems. To do this, the process is protected by your ORCiD password so nobody else can use this number in the submission process. Therefore, it is an unambiguous identifier for you as an author. Furthermore, it is now becoming common to see the ORCiD logo and an author's number displayed next to their name in the by-line of published articles. In the online version, this provides a link whereby the profile of the author can be checked. Grant awarding bodies are also requesting that applicants provide their ORCiD number along with project grant applications. ORCiD is easy and free to use. It takes only a few minutes to set up a profile; articles already on ResearcherID and Scopus can be transferred across, others can be searched online or entered manually. ORCiD staff are working with groups and organizations to create “macros” that allow citations to be easily imported to your profile. You can “search and link” from various databases, such as CrossRef or EuropePMC, and more are in the works. Research grants can be found using ÜberWizard for ORCID. All data can be entered manually; your employment record must be entered this way. Of course, manual entry takes more time, but the profile does not all have to be completed all at once. Finally, there is provision to write, free text, a profile about yourself, your interests and achievements. The possibilities for using ORCiD are many and only restricted by the imagination of the user. The ORCiD logo and the QR code could be a useful addition to business cards so that people can easily check your profile. ORCiD may come to replace CVs in the process of applying for jobs. Instead of the varied online profiles—or none—of academic staff, a profile picture accompanied by a link to ORCiD and one to ResearcherID could simplify these considerably and obviate the need to update them and avoid having out-of-date and incomplete information on profile pages. Amidst a plethora of online platforms for recording and sharing achievements, some of which have already proven ephemeral, ORCiD is a genuine industry-wide attempt to create an international gold standard. ORCiD is a club to which anyone can belong. I am sure that it will be considered unusual—or simply obstinate—in the near future, in academia, not to have an ORCiD profile. Finished yours yet? Roger Watson, PhD, FAAN, FRCN is Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Advanced Nursing; Editor, Nursing Open, and Professor of Nursing, University of Hull, UK. He is also a member of the Authors-in-Residence for Nurse Author & Editor. Contact Roger by email: r.watson@hull.ac.uk and follow him on Twitter: @rwatson1955. His ORCiD ID is orcid.org/0000–0001–8040–7625