As a research organization, you are in a unique position to connect validated, trustworthy information about your researchers and their affiliation with you to their ORCID records. This enables you to take control of how your name is used in the research literature, ands allows you to easily keep track of former staff, students, and faculty. It makes it simple for your researchers to share accurate and authoritative information about their affiliation with your institution when applying for grants, publishing an article, book, or database, and more.
These workflows are applicable to student management, enrolment, human resources and profile systems.
Workflow 1: Collecting iDs within your systems
- When registering their details via a web form, registrants are asked to authenticate their ORCID iD and grant your organization permission to interact with their record.
- Once their registration is approved, your system updates the appropriate section of the individual’s ORCID record with details of their position or distinction, connecting them with your organization.
- Display their authenticated ORCID iD alongside any publicly available information about them.
Workflow 2: Collecting iDs retrospectively
If your system already contains information about your researchers and their past activities, or if there is no registration component, you can instead:
- Email individuals a unique link they can use to connect themselves with your system.
- When clicked, this link directs the individual to ORCID to authenticate their iD and grant your organization permission to update their record.
- You then redirect them to a specially created web page you provide.
- Your system stores the link between the ORCID iD and email address/user account, and uses the permissions the individual has granted to update the appropriate section of their ORCID record, connecting them and their activity with your organization.
- Display their authenticated ORCID iD alongside any publicly available information about them.
Affiliation assertions contain start dates and end dates, and we strongly encourage you to populate these fields where possible, as this makes verification of the researcher’s affiliation with your organization easier. The workflows above enable long-term update permissions, which can be used to update the end date when an individual’s affiliation ends. Your system should use the ORCID API to add an end date (where applicable), in order to make the full term of the affiliation clear.
Example
Benefits
You can help your researchers get credit by connecting validated information about their affiliation with you to their ORCID records. At the same time, you will be helping to build trust in scholarly communications. By asserting the connection between individuals and your organization — connections that only your organization can make authoritatively — you ensure that your organization is appropriately acknowledged when your employees and affiliates make professional contributions. That information can then be shared, with the researcher’s permission, with the other systems they interact with, helping to create a trustworthy research information infrastructure
Technical documentation
A more detailed tutorial can be found here.
More information
Metadata
All affiliation sections use the same set of metadata in the API:
- Organization name:* The name of the organization at the highest level (e.g. “Boston University” rather than “Boston University School of Medicine”).
- Organization city:* City of where the organisation is based.
- Organization region: Region of where the organisation is based.
- Organization country* the country of the organisation. This should be populated with the two letter ISO 3166 Alpha-2 country code.
- Organization ID (ROR, GRID, Ringgold** or LEI):* A unique identifier for the organization and its source. We recommend that the parent organization ID is used within the affiliation and not the division or department.
- Role/Title: The position held, or the degree awarded or to be awarded.
- Department: Any subdivision of the parent organization.
- URL: A URL to a resource about the affiliation
- Start date: The date the relationship between the researcher and organization began (can be specified down to year, month, and day).
- End date: The date the relationship between the researcher and organization ended (can be specified down to year, month, and day)
- An external persistent identifier describing the affiliation: A unique identifier for the actual affiliation assertion
*Indicates a required field.
**Although Ringgold identifiers still exist within the ORCID registry, as of 1 August 2023, ORCID no longer receives updates to the RINGGOLD organization identifier database used by our Registry, nor will we be able to process or use RINGGOLD IDs created after that date. See our FAQ for more info.
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ORCID API
The ORCID record is divided into individual sections to make reading the record faster and more consistent. You can first call a section to receive its summary, and then call using an individual item’s put code to receive robust information on that item.
A table of the summary sections that you can use the API to read are set out below.
| Endpoint | Description |
| /record | Summary view of the full ORCID record |
| /person | Biographical section of the ORCID record, including through /researcher-urls below |
| /summary | Summary view of validated and self asserted items on the ORCID record (only available with the member API) |
| /address | The researcher’s countries or regions |
| The email address(es) associated with the record | |
| /external-identifiers | Linked external identifiers in other systems |
| /keywords | Keywords related to the researcher and their work |
| /other-names | Other names by which the researcher is know |
| /personal-details | Personal details: the researcher‚s name, credit (published) name, and biography |
| /researcher-urls | Links to the researcher‚s personal or profile pages |
| /activities | Summary of the activities section of the ORCID record, including through /works below. |
| /educations | Education affiliations |
| /employments | Employment affiliations |
| /fundings | Summary of funding activities |
| /peer-reviews | Summary of peer review activities |
| /works | Summary of research works |
| /research-resources | Summary of research resources |
| /services | Summary of services |
| /qualifications | Summary of qualifications |
| /memberships | Summary of memberships |
| /distinctions | Summary of distinctions |
| /invited-positions | Summary of invited positions |
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There are two different update scopes – one for biographical details, the other for activities.
| Scope | Description | API endpoints |
| /person/update | Biographical data-the left column of the ORCID record user interface. | /address /external-identifiers /keywords /other-names /researcher-urls |
| /activities/update | Research activity data-the right column of the ORCID record user interface. | /distinction /distinctions /education /educations /employment /employments /funding /fundings /invited-position /invited-positions /membership /memberships /peer-review /peer-reviews /qualification /qualifications /research-resource /research-resources /service /services /work /works |
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