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Scholarly Metrics & Altmetrics: ORCID Profile

Tools for measuring scholarly impact, journal impact factors, altmetrics, and managing your scholarly identity.

Challenge 2 - ORCID Profile

We hope you found the first week of the UNR Libraries' Scholarly Impact Challenge helpful. Today, we'll focus on another website, ORCID.org, you can use to create an overall scholarly profile. Why two places? They both have their pros and cons, and in the end, they're both good at automatically updating your profiles, meaning less work for you. Again, feel free to just take the initial steps or, if you have more time or interest, check out the advanced steps as well.

What It Is

If you're not familiar with an ORCID profile, it's similar to a Google Scholar profile in that it's also a free way to make a simple online page that can include all your scholarly works. Unlike Google Scholar, its original purpose was to help distinguish authors from each other. So, when you run across a citation for a J. Doe, how do you know if it's THIS J. Doe instead of THAT J. Doe? 

ORCID's solution was to give a unique ID to each scholarly author who signs up for an ORCID profile. This way any article - or other work including conference posters, grants, and more - you put on your ORCID profile can officially be connected to you. But ORCID has become more than that as well. Many publishers now allow you to sign into their publishing systems using an ORCID log in, meaning fewer accounts to manage and remember. Others ask or even require that you submit your ORCID ID when you submit your research for publication. This way when they publish the work, they can more definitively connect it to you - and this also allows ORCID to quickly and easily add the work to your profile. ORCID is also a not-for-profit institution and is well integrated with the research community.

Screenshot of an ORCID profile, including name, other known names, places of employment, publicly available emails, other scholarly IDs associated with the author, and the country of the author.

What To Do

To make your profile, visit the ORCID registration page. We suggest using your personal email as your primary email - you'll see that you can add other emails to your account, including your UNR one. But this way you don't have to worry about changing your log in information if you leave the school. 

Continue to follow the registration prompts (note that the default is for ORCID to not send you any emails!) On the final page, you'll be asked to set a privacy level for your account. We suggest choosing the public option as you can later decide if there are individual parts of your profile that you would prefer remain private. The "Trusted Organization" option does not apply at UNR as we are not an institutional member.

That's it! You've created an ORCID profile. The biggest thing to remember is that you should only do this once! If you keep creating a different profile, you'll end up with multiple ORCID IDs, which just defeats the purpose of having a one-stop-shop of all your stuff.

Advanced

Congrats - you've got an ORCID profile! But it probably looks a little bare. When you have the time, you can take the below steps to flesh it out:

  • Add your education and employment information. Let people know which institutions you're affiliated with. Just click on the "Add Education" or "Add Employment" buttons and fill out the boxes.
  • Add other names you've gone by. Many times we use different forms of our name when publishing - maybe in your first conference poster you used your full name, and then in your second you used your middle initial. Use this space to put in all possible names you've used that might be related to your scholarly work. 
  • Add committees you've served on. Growing your scholarly impact isn't just about promoting your research. Help other researchers how you're involved in the profession as well by adding societies you're a member of and any committees work you've done.
  • Add funding you've received. If you're fortunate enough to have won a grant or been on a grant-funded team, you can add that to your profile as well. ORCID can help you do some of this automatically. First, select "Add funding" and then select "Search and Link." From there, choose "Dimension Wizard," which will open up a new window. You can then search Dimension to see if they have the record for your grant already and just have it connected to your ORCID page. If they don't have it, you can choose "Add manually" after selecting "Add funding."
  • Add your work. ORCID offers several ways to add your works, although unfortunately, the bulk options don't always work the best. If you don't have too many works under your belt yet, we suggest starting first with "Add DOI" under the "Add works" button. This will prompt you to enter the DOI (or Digital Object Identifier) for each work you have. From there, ORCID can grab all the needed information for each one to create a record for it. If a work doesn't have a DOI - many times conference presentations don't - you can then choose to add it manually. If the thought of adding your work item by item hurts to think about, you can choose "Search and Link" from the "Add works" list. From there, the best two options we recommend are linking to your Scopus profile and Lens.org. Linking to Lens will allow it update your ORCID profile with any articles it identifies with you. You will need to create a Lens.org account (free) to do this. Scopus will take you to a search page where you can look for articles by your name and affiliation. It will allow you to review all the articles before adding them to your profile.
  • Choose your privacy levels. You'll notice each item in a section allows you to decide if you want to make it publicly viewable (icon with the three green heads) or private (the red lock icon). If for whatever reason you don't want people seeing part of your profile - such as your personal email address - now's a good time to select the privacy icon.
  • Sit back and relax. ORCID does a pretty good job of automatically adding your published work to your profile once everything is set up.

What To Watch Out For

ORCID can make your life easier, especially by automating a lot of the steps. But it's not always perfect, so there might be times it doesn't catch when you publish something. 

ORCID can also be a little clunky to work with, especially when you try to connect to other platforms such as Scopus or Lens.org to help update your profile. If you're ever not sure, please feel free to email Social Sciences Librarian Teresa Schultz at teresas@unr.edu for help.