Creating an ORCID profile

The Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) is a free unique persistent identifier that you can use to easily distinguish your publications from those of other researchers. You can register for an ORCID at any career stage, and you can keep your ORCID throughout your career.

What is an ORCID?

An ORCID is a unique identifier that you can use to easily distinguish your work from that of other researchers. Your ORCID belongs to you and stays with you throughout your career, even if you move institutions, and wherever in the world you work.

ORCID is fast becoming an international standard, with millions of IDs already in use. It's increasingly being requested by research publishers and funders, and it's open to all researchers, in any discipline and at any career stage.

The initiative is community-driven and not-for-profit. It's not commercial, and it exists solely for the benefit of researchers.

Watch our short video on the benefits of ORCiD and how to set up your ORCiD here.

Why use ORCID?

As a researcher, it's important for you to establish a unique professional identity. Your name is central to your profile, but it's not enough to reliably distinguish you and ensure that you get the credit for your work.

This is especially the case when information about you and your research is shared electronically between systems.

You may think that your name is unique enough in your area of research for others to easily find you. Unfortunately, that is not always the case.

It's not uncommon for people to have issues trying to identify authors, due to things like different languages, typos or spelling conventions. Just because you don't have a namesake at the moment, that doesn't rule out one appearing in the future.

ORCID also promotes the discoverability of your research activities. When someone clicks on your ORCID ID, they are taken to your profile page. You can configure this to show your outputs, grants and professional history.

ORCID has many other advantages, such as: saving you time on keeping your research record current; preventing the need for duplicate data entry; and ensuring people and affiliations are consistently and reliably represented.

Students and staff: How to register for an ORCID

It takes just 30 seconds to claim your ORCID ID, and then a few more minutes to set up your profile:

Go to https://orcid.org/register.
Complete the registration form using any of your email addresses (you can add other email addresses later to your profile). If your name is already in the ORCID system, you'll be prompted to claim an existing profile or make a new one. If you experience any problems at this stage see the ORCID help page.
Go to your email and verify your address.
Congratulations, you have now claimed your ORCID ID! Your 16-digit ID will be shown in the left column, under your name.
Add some information to your profile, for example your biography, education, personal information. Click on the pencil icon next to each item to edit it.
Decide who can see each section using the visibility icon next to each item.
Click on ‘+ add works’ and then ‘search & link’ to see if you can automatically import your papers using the DOIs, or ‘+add manually’ to add the information yourself.

Although you can get the benefits of an ORCID ID without having a completed profile, we recommended that you at least enter your institutional affiliation to help other researchers who may be searching for you.

If you wish to use ORCID to promote your professional profile, you should add details of your publications, datasets, conference presentations, blog posts, and grants.

Outputs and grants can also be automatically added to your ORCID profile and kept up to date by using one of the linked services. We particularly recommend that you configure the Scopus, Crossref and DataCite sources.

Staff: How to connect your ORCID to myPublications

If you connect your ORCID with myPublications, your outputs will be imported and claimed automatically for you.

Log in to myPublications (under ‘My services’ on the Sheffield Staff hub homepage).
On the left-hand menu, select ‘Profile and work’, and then ‘ORCID settings’.
Click Register or Connect your ORCID ID to be taken to the ORCID website. Either sign-in to your account or create a new one. You will then be asked to authorise myPublications to connect with your account. Click 'Authorize'.
Once you have established a connection, you can select the level of integration. It is entirely your choice which to use:
1. Read from and write publication data to my ORCID account: sends outputs from myPublications to ORCID and reads information from your ORCID record to improve the accuracy of your search results. You can configure which outputs to send, including limiting to favourites or excluding hidden outputs. If this option is greyed out then click the Reconnect your ORCID ID button to reauthenticate.
2. Read data from my ORCID account: reads information from your ORCID record to improve the accuracy of your search results but does not send output data to ORCID.
3. Only use my ORCID iD to support automatic claiming: myPublications will neither read from nor write to your ORCID account, but will configure the ID for automatic claiming.
Select which publications will be sent to your ORCID.
Click the Send affiliation button to create an employment record on your ORCID profile with the affiliation of ‘University of Sheffield’.

Making the most out of ORCID

Tell people about it

Once you have an ORCID ID, make sure you let everyone know about it.

Include it in

your email signature
business cards
your staff profile page
any other place where people might want to find out more about you and your research

Use the full URL so that people know it is an ORCID ID and can easily navigate to your account page, e.g. http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4240-5455.

Provide your ID

Increasing numbers of publishers and funders are supporting ORCID.

Provide your ORCID ID whenever the option is available. This will increase the visibility and the discoverability of your work.

Give your ID with manuscript submissions and grant applications. This enables information to be easily shared between systems, increasing accuracy and reducing the need to enter the same information multiple times.