ORCID: Identifying Yourself in a Digital World

Use Case: Resolve Name Ambiguity Problems

It is currently very difficult to:

• Track different forms of an individual researcher's name across systems and publishers
• Distinguish between different researchers with the same name
• Identify all scholarly works associated with a particular researcher

Researcher names can be ambiguous for several reasons. People who have published under common names, maiden names, abbreviations, or names including non-Roman characters, may encounter difficulties in being discovered online. ORCIDs clarify this ambiguity by providing unique identifiers for each researcher.

The following example illustrates the number of ways that a single person's name could be rendered in publications and research outputs (Slide by Mogens Sandfær of DEFF)

Use Case: Save Time

ORCIDs have already been integrated into workflows used by a variety of publishers, funders, and research organizations. The result is that citations can automatically be pushed to and from your ORCID profile with minimal effort on your part.