ORCID: Link Your Name With Your Research

Author identifiers, such as ORCIDs, allow you to reliably and unambiguously connect your name with your work throughout your career, including your published papers, research data, funding, institutional affiliations, or work history.  Author identifiers are helpful in a number of ways:

• Provides a means to distinguish between you and other authors with identical or similar names
• Links together all of your scholarly activities even if you have used different names over the course of your career
• Makes it easy for others (grant funders, other researchers, etc.) to find your research output
• Ensures that your work is clearly attributed to you

ORCID stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID and is a free, unique persistent identifier (PID) for individuals. ORCID or ORCID iD is a 16-digit number and the associated profile that links all research activities to an individual author/researcher. ORCID iDs:

• ...are universally recognized and not tied to any specific database or publisher
• ...enable authors to unambiguously link their name to all their scholarly outputs - articles, data, grants, etc.
• ...enable institutions to accurately know what their affiliated authors are creating
• ...allow authors to curate their online profile
• ...make it easy to import research output from other sources (including ResearcherID, Scopus Author ID, and Datacite Metadata Store) to your ORCID profile
• ...are integrated into many organizations and publishers platforms including Nature Publishing Group, Elsevier, and the American Physical Society