Engaging with our community — ORCID members and users, consortia lead organizations, and the wider research community — is incredibly important to us. It helps us better understand your needs for the ORCID Registry and ensures that we continue to develop new functionality that meets those needs. We’re lucky to have such a diverse and engaged global community and we appreciate all the feedback you share with us – negative as well as positive.
This year, as part of our efforts to collect evidence of ORCID’s value to researchers and their organizations, we’re paying extra attention to your feedback, in several ways:
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Experimenting with sentiment analysis. According to Wikipedia: “Generally speaking, sentiment analysis aims to determine the attitude of a speaker, writer, or other subject with respect to some topic or the overall contextual polarity or emotional reaction to a document,
interaction, or event.” Since the start of 2018, we’ve been running monthly sentiment analysis reports that characterize mentions of ORCID in social and traditional media as positive, negative, or neutral. These cover mentions of ORCID in all countries and languages, collected via a third-party media monitoring service that we subscribe to. As with any form of algorithm-driven logic, a degree of manual review is needed to identify false negatives and positives, but a few months in we’re pretty confident that we’re getting it mostly right. And the good news is – we are mostly getting it right! Although there’s some variation by month, overall there are many more positive than negative mentions of ORCID in traditional and (especially) social media -
Monitoring Twitter more closely. With over 23,000 followers, our Twitter account is a great way of engaging with you, and this year — in conjunction with the sentiment analysis reporting — we’ve been keeping a close eye on what you have to say to and about us. As you can see from just this tiny sample of tweets, you’ve shared your ideas, reported problems, given us kudos, and more! We take your tweets seriously. In the past few months, we’ve been working on improvements to our OAuth screen to respond to some concerns raised on Twitter about it not being clear enough; discussing your suggestions for new functionality and new use cases for ORCID, such as conflict of interest statements; and sharing your celebratory tweets in our own presentations and reports.
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Surveys, surveys, surveys. One of the best ways to find out what you really think is — to ask you! Over the past few years, we’ve carried out a couple of community surveys of ORCID users and non-users (in 2015 and 2017), as well as one of our consortia lead organizations (also in 2017). The feedback you gave us has been incredibly valuable, leading, for example, to the development of our Collect & Connect program (intended in part to address your concerns about the lack of consistency in user experience across systems); the publishers ORCID open letter (the vast majority of respondents told us you support organizations requiring iDs); and the launch of our new outreach resources (to address some common misunderstanding reported in the surveys). We’ll shortly be launching our first members survey, to be followed in early 2019 by our next community survey and consortia leads survey. As usual, we’ll be sharing the results here and in our repository.
Thank you for sharing your own ORCID experiences — good and bad — and please keep the tweets, comments, suggestions, complaints and kudos coming! We’ll continue to collect the evidence of ORCID’s value and to welcome your input and feedback on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn or at [email protected].