Why does Collate use ORCID?

Collate automatically discovers and shares your group's new publications by monitoring the ORCID profiles of your researchers. ORCID is the most reliable way to track research output across publishers, institutions, and career changes — which is why it's the backbone of Collate's automated workflows. Below is a primer on what ORCID is and why it matters.

What is ORCID?

ORCID stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID.

ORCID provides for you, a researcher, what a DOI provides for each of your articles — a persistent, unique identifier across the global research ecosystem.

But why does this matter?

There would be no need for ORCID if every researcher had an absolutely unique name, no researcher ever changed their name, no researcher ever moved to another institution, no researcher ever had their name mis-spelled, and no institution ever changed its name.

When one or more of the above changes occur, it raises a very old, thorny problem: how does the international research community disambiguate between the "two versions" of you in the academic literature? How should the data systems that manage new citations calculate "which you is you?" Whose algorithm should be entrusted to decide "which version of you" is accredited with the new citation?

This is the first big problem that ORCID solves

Without ORCID, attributing new citations of your work to "you" is an error-prone calculation, because your data as an author is structured independently and differently by each publisher and data management provider. (This is one of the reasons why an h-index — which measures both productivity and citation impact — can vary greatly across different platforms like Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science.)

However, with ORCID, new citations of your research are reliably attributed to you via your persistent identifier. Regardless of changes across your career and institutional affiliations, ORCID ensures that you can accrue and quantify the influence of your work over time.

ORCID as Knowledge Mobilization

In the same way DOIs allow your articles to be indexed across platforms, ORCID supports the aggregation of your citations across all research management systems. This includes important research tools like Scopus, Web of Science, Mendeley, and institutional repositories.

ORCID is an important part of a good knowledge mobilization strategy. And it is important for being a "good citizen" of the global scientific metadata community. ORCID's interoperability and integration with major databases streamlines the dissemination of your work across the entire research community.

ORCID is a worldwide standard

Globally, ORCID is increasingly implemented as best practice. Over 1,200 major academic institutions, publishers, and funders now integrate with ORCID. Over 7,000 journals request ORCID for submission and publication.

Because it helps ensure the accuracy of author metrics and research data systems, there is a global trend towards mandating ORCID across the research lifecycle. For example, major publishers, including Wiley, Springer Nature, and PLOS, require ORCID as a prerequisite for publication. A growing number of funders require ORCID for applications.

Does ORCID solve any other problems?

ORCID is an international, open, and interoperable standardization. This offers many other time-saving efficiencies for researchers and institutions. For example, ORCID's auto-update functionality can catalogue all your new publications automatically. You can then import this aggregated data directly into your Canadian Common CV (CCV) when applying for funding.

Because ORCID integrates with a "critical mass" of research data management systems, it saves significant administrative overhead across a research program. For example, when you interact with an ORCID-integrated funder or publisher, there are major gains in accuracy and speed because individual researcher details do not require manual re-entry in every system. ORCID becomes, essentially, a single "researcher login" across platforms.

In alignment with the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA), ORCID enables accurate attribution of a wide array of research outputs and fosters transparency. ORCID has the potential to support an equitable and comprehensive research assessment landscape, based on a broader scope of contributions (beyond journal-based metrics like the Journal Impact Factor).

But "Who" is ORCID, exactly?

ORCID is managed and maintained by an independent non-profit organization, headquartered in Bethesda, Maryland. Importantly and critically, ORCID is a standards platform like the DOI Foundation — not a commercial entity like Clarivate or Elsevier. The ORCID non-profit organization is funded through a combination of grants, contributions from founding sponsors, and is sustained by membership fees of partnering institutions.

ORCID emphasizes privacy and control. Individual researchers can set visibility settings of their records. They can decide which information to make public, share with trusted organizations, or keep private.

ORCID and Collate

ORCID is an integral backbone of Collate. Our automated workflows for sharing your new publications are fully integrated with ORCID.

Like the DOI standard, the ORCID standard is a prominent global trend, is increasingly adopted by institutions across the ecosystem, and has emerged as a standard baseline expectation in research data stewardship. Because ORCID has become an indelible part of the contemporary research enterprise, we are here to support you however we can as the standard intersects your research program.

Tips for Optimizing Your ORCID Profile

• Include your first name and last name, plus any alternate renderings of your name as they appear in your scholarship
• Ensure your institutional email address is set as the main email (ideally, make it publicly displayed)
• Make sure your current affiliation is selected via the dropdown menu
• The more items in your profile with the "Public" visibility setting, the more other systems (including Collate) can utilize, reference and share your research
• Setup your profile to auto-update with new publications as you are published

Quick Links

Sign-in to ORCID

Register for ORCID

Learn how to set your ORCID profile to auto-update

Updating ORCID

The easiest way to add works and trusted parties is to click the "+ Add" link on the header of the "Works" section in your ORCID profile, then click "Search & link" to see all available options. Adding Crossref is a great place to start — it can automatically send new publication records to your ORCID as they are published. You can also link Web of Science, Scopus, and other major databases from this same menu.

Super tip! You can see all the third party organizations you have already trusted at orcid.org/trusted-parties to verify what other services have permission to add new works to your ORCID record.

This document is maintained by the team at Collate by Narratory, a platform for automating newsletters and publication tracking for research units. Learn more at collate.narratory.com.