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.
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.
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.
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:
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.