Distinguish yourself with an #ORCID iD

Eva Borger
Tuesday 14 August 2018

What is ORCID?

ORCID is an independent non-profit organization that provides a persistent identifier – an ORCID iD – that distinguishes you from other researchers and a mechanism for linking your research outputs and activities to your iD. ORCID is integrated into many systems used by publishers, funders, institutions, and other research-related services.
Over 5 Million researchers from all disciplines worldwide have signed up for an ORCID iD. They use them to get credit for their work and save time by including them in webpages, when submitting publications, applying for grants, and in many other research workflows. The University of St Andrews strongly supports the use of ORCID iDs and expects all its researchers to have an ORCID iD by summer 2019. You can find out more about how ORCID iDs can be used at St Andrews on our ORCID pages.

Many St Andrews researchers are on board already

graph of the number of ORCID IDs
The number of ORCID iDs in Pure and the ORCID registry

In a survey of 238 St Andrews researchers last year (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5436148.v1), 60% of respondents indicated that they have an ORCID iD. However, our latest figures show that there are in fact 384 ORCID iDs with a current University of St Andrews affiliation in the ORCID registry, so chances are that your colleague next door already has an ORCID iD. Have you spotted it, maybe in their email signature, an online profile or latest paper? Unfortunately, we only know of 167 ORCID iDs recorded in Pure, so many researchers are still missing out on the advantages of linking their ORCID iD to their Pure profile. Find out more about the advantages of linking Pure to your ORCID profile on our on our ORCID pages.

St Andrews researchers use ORCID iDs in different places

ORCID iD usage chart
How researchers used ORCID iDs (1 user/square)

The most common use cases for researchers were to associate an ORCID iD with publications and to automatically update an ORCID record from Pure or other external sources. Some also linked their ORCID iDs to contents in research data repositories, used them them to automatically share information during grant application or to let a funding database update their ORCID record.

What researchers wanted to learn more about

The survey also asked respondents which topics they would like to get more information about or have advice on. Information about connecting an ORCID iD to Pure, authentication to ORCID using single-sign-on, creating a handy ORCID iD QR-code, collating all those research identifiers in one place by linking them to an ORCID iD and use during grant applications and paper submission were major topics, for which we will make sure to have to have some answers ready for our researchers.
If you would like to find out more about ORCID and how to use it with your Pure account, you can visit the University’s ORCID pages. or visit or the ORCID knowledgebase. For any further questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch directly at [email protected].

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