The ORCID vision is a world in which all who participate in research, scholarship, and innovation are uniquely identified and connected to their contributions and affiliations across disciplines, borders, and time. Here, you can learn how to work with the community to make that vision a reality, by focusing on a shared user experience and key roles and opportunities for implementing identifiers in your sector.
Below are five basic steps to implementing ORCID, all of which are included in our documented workflows, system best practices and tutorials. All integrations must collect authenticated ORCID iDs and display the iDs as per our guidelines if shared publicly .
Collect authenticated ORCID iDs only!
Never ask researchers to manually type in or search for their ORCID iD. Collecting authenticated ORCID iDs for researchers through the ORCID OAUTH API process is important. This process ensures you get the correct ORCID iD, avoids misattribution and allows you to obtain permission to read and update your researchers ORCID record. During this process, researchers sign into their ORCID account using their registered email address and password, or in the case of new users, create an account. They then authorize your system to obtain their ORCID iD. Please see Collecting and Sharing ORCID iDs for more information. There are a small number of ways that you can customize this experience for your users too.
Display authenticated iDs
ORCID welcomes and encourages community use of ORCID iDs. Our goal is to make ORCID iDs readable and useful. Once a researcher has connected their ORCID iD to your integration, store and publicly display their iD within your systems, websites and include the iD in third party data where applicable. Display the iD following our Brand guidelines when the ORCID iD is publicly displayed within your application.
Add data to your researchers’ ORCID records
It’s essential that organizations play their part by creating validated assertions about the connections between them and their researchers. For research institutions, this means validating their researchers’ affiliation(s); for publishers, their works (publications, reviews, datasets, and more); and for funders, their awards and grants. Adding this information to ORCID records saves your researchers time and enables researchers to easily provide validated information to other systems and profiles they use.
Read data from your researchers’ ORCID record
Most organizations ask their researchers for the same information multiple times for different purposes. To save them time entering this information manually, and to improve the quality and robustness of your data, you can instead populate standard fields in your reports and forms using information from a researcher’s ORCID record. You can also collect information from ORCID records and use identifiers from those records to query verified scholarly data sources for full data which can then be added to your system.
Synchronize the information flow between your system and ORCID
Using the ORCID API to exchange information between your system and ORCID records allows up-to-date and accurate information to flow between your systems and also other systems your researchers use. This provides the greatest benefit for your researchers, your organization, and the broader scholarly community.
We have documented our best practices for the main types of system integrations.