Enhancing your visibility

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier)

What is an ORCID?

ORCID is unique and permanent identifier for researchers. It distinguishes you from other researchers and connects you with your research publications and professional activities.

Why is an ORCID important?

It is strategically important because it enables all databases to automatically link publications to you by your ORCID. An ORCID is free, easy to get and stays with you throughout your academic career.

What are the benefits of an ORCID for me as a researcher?

• Avoids name confusion, increases visibility
  An ORCID iD helps you to link your unique identifier with your publications and research activities. An ORCID prevents confusion about author names and ensures you will get credit for your work. It benefits your visibility and impact.

• International standard
  ORCID is growing fast as the international identifier for researchers. More and more journals and funders request or even require an ORCID iD if you send in your manuscript or grant application.

• Saves time
  Once you have an ORCID, you do not have to fill in your address, employment history and affiliation details over and over again when applying for grants or submitting a manuscript. 

• Open and transparent
  ORCID is an open, community-driven, non-profit organization. The identifier is universal and interoperable and it fits within the context of open science.

• Privacy well protected
  Researchers own and control their own ORCID records. As a researcher you decide what to register, what to link to your iD and what organizations you allow access.

• Not limited to a single institution
  You can take your ORCID with you throughout your academic career, even when you move from one university or research institute to another.

How to create an ORCID and connect it to the PURE database.

Questions about ORCID? Mail orcid umcg.nl

ResearcherID is the profile tool from Web of Science. ResearcherID offers a public profile. You can choose what to show publicly. ResearcherID is also important as a basis to provide feedback to Web of Science for grouping author name variants or corrections to affiliations.

• Go to Researcher ID, sign up and complete your profile.
• Add some publications if you have a few listed in Web of Science and preview the public version of your profile.
• If you already have made an ORCID ID you can link Researcher ID to that. It is best to do that in a place where you have access to Web of Science.

Google Scholar is by far the most widely used bibliographical tool for scholarly publications. You can enhance your findability by creating an account and telling Google which publications in their database are yours. After taking the steps below, searches on your name will show your profile on top of the results. The profile itself shows your list of publications in Google Scholar with basic metrics. Besides journal papers, it may also include books and reports.

• First, create a Google account
• Go to Google Scholar
• Make sure you are logged in and click "My Citations"
• Follow instructions to create your profile and add or remove publications that are yours or not yours

The Scopus Author ID helps author recognition and disambiguation when searching publications. Many researchers already have a Scopus ID without realising it. By checking the correctness of publications assigned to your Scopus Author ID, you will certainly help others finding your publications. It will also improve completeness and correctness of citation analyses.

• Go to Scopus
• Use the 'author search' tab to search for your own name
• Check if all publications assigned to you are correct and if there are no variants of your name that are not yet grouped to your main entry.
• If there are ungrouped name variants with your publications send Scopus feedback by checking name variants and clicking 'Request to merge authors' on top of the results list. (For that it may be required to create a personal account within the institutional license).

Academia is a large researcher community. Just as ResearchGate it connects scholars around topics. You can add papers through a built in search using Microsoft Academic, PubMed and ArXiv. You can also add ful text. The process is easy, but the coverage not as comprehensive as Google Scholar.

• Go to Academia.edu and sign up.
• Add publications/papers by clicking your name top right, then "add papers"and "import"
• Find a few people in your field to follow

ResearchGate is a very large researcher community linking researchers around topics. It is frequently used to ask questions to collegues all over the world that have the same set of interests and specialisations. You can choose which topics or researchers to follow. You can automatically populate your publications list or add items from reference management tools or add manually. You can even upload and share full text publications (e.g. last author versions that many publishers allow you to share).

• Go to Researchgate
• Sign up and complete your profile with whatever you think relevant.
• Add your publications by clicking "Add Publications" and choosing "Author Match".
• Select topics to follow if you want

Mendeley is a reference management tool that is used by millions of researchers, offers immediate readership statistics and has strong social functions. Probably many of your publications are already present in the Mendeley database, but with your own account you can make sure that all of them are.

• Go to Mendeley, make an account
• Complete your profile
• Add publications:
  add PDF files of your papers from your hard drive (in one go)
  or add references from a search in Google Scholar or another bibliographic database
• Start building a network of colleagues or (open or closed) groups

Read more in our Mendeley guide

Of course, for the reference management function of Mendeley there are many alternatives, such as Endnote and RefWorks. Read more about how to manage literature and data