ORCID IDs

This image has the ORCID logo and tagline: Connecting Research and Researchers. It also identifies Western as a Member Organization.

What is ORCID?

The Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) is a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher. It also supports automatic links between you and your research activities, such as publications and grant applications. ORCID ensures that you receive consistent, reliable attribution for your work.

Why should I have an ORCID?

Having an ORCID ID lets you:

  • Stand out: distinguish your research activities from others with similar names and affiliations, and pull together work you published under different names or name variants (e.g., initials, full first names, different last names);
  • Get credit for your work: easily associate your identity with all of your research activities and objects, such as publications, datasets, equipment, articles, media stories, curated exhibits, citations, experiments, patents, teaching notes and notebooks;
  • Take control of your privacy: you determine which research activities and objects are publicly available;
  • Work less: ORCID reduces the amount of manual data entry you have to do through automatic harvesting of associated activities and objects;
  • Change jobs, institutions, or industries, seamlessly: your data 'moves' with your ORCID across organizations and national boundaries;
  • Collaborate: highlight your interactions with multiple organizations, publishers, and funders; and,
  • Extend the reach of your work: ORCID improves the discoverability of your profile and your associated research activities and objects.

How do I get an ORCID?

  1. Sign up at the ORCID site, https://orcid.org/. It takes 30 seconds to complete the form.
  2. Add your previous publications to your profile. Using the ORCID wizards, you can make good progress on this in as little as ten minutes.
  3. Use your ORCID when you submit manuscripts, apply for grants, or update your CV.

Contact the Research and Scholarly Communication librarians at rsclib@uwo.ca with any questions about ORCID.

The content on this page was adapted from the Simon Fraser University Scholarly Publishing website.