This guide collects guidance for all authors on the following author identifiers and profiles;
Author Identifiers can uniquely identify you and link your research activity to you, increasing the visibility of your research (and potential to attract citations) in addition to other benefits (such as reducing data entry by providing options for seemless data transfer between systems).
The guide below offers a quick overview and comparison of the four most widely used author IDs, whilst the following videos on the page show to create or maintain your ORCID, Google Scholar, Publons or Scopus Author ID.
Scopus is a bibliographic and citation database, indexing over 19,000 journals, conference proceedings, monographs and book chapters. If you have published an article in any of the titles it indexes, you will likely have a Scopus Author Profile; it is well worth being aware of how to claim and correct these automatically generated profiles, which are used by some organisations for recruitment or collaboration purposes.
Publons previously allowed authors to showcase their peer review and editorial contributions, but since being purchased by Clarivate Analytics and integrated with ResearcherID and Web of Science, it now also allows authors to link their publication activity as well.
An ORCID ID is a non-proprietary unique author ID which is used by funder, publisher and research organisations to share information – and reduce the amount of time you (as an author, researcher or reviewer) spend keying that same information into multiple systems.
Anyone can register for an ORCID - it only takes a few minutes. ORCID IDs are most useful for active researchers who wish to keep track of their research publications (and other outputs), research grants and other indicators of research activity and esteem.
You can also register directly at https://orcid.org/login.
We recommend you that you provide a primary and secondary email address. One of which should be your Durham University email address. The other can be a personal email address so that you to take your ORCID with you if you leave Durham University.
With an ORCID ID you ensure all of your grant, publication (and other output) and some esteem activities are correctly attributed to you. Your record stays with you and can be used to share that information as you change institution or where you are required to provide it as part of funding applications and manuscript submissions.
In January 2019, Research England published its Guidance on Submissions and Panel Criteria. The guidance lists ORCID under required data for all Category A submitted staff, where held, and required for all researchers named in Impact Case Studies. Durham expects all Durham staff and doctoral students to register for an ORCID ID, and to record this on their profile within the university's staff profile system (see R&IS Funding Bulletin June 2018).
You may find you are asked, or required, to provide an ORCID for any organisation’s online systems which have integrated with ORCID. This includes:
Researcher’s control of their ORCID record is a core ORCID principle.
You are responsible for your ORCID record. You control which systems you allow to share information with ORCID (e.g. to keep it up-to-date automatically), and you control the privacy of your ORCID record and information associated with it, and only you can manually add or update information (e.g. biographical information, education and employment history) associated with your ORCID.
If you try to register for a new ORCID using the same email address, you will be prompted to log in rather than to register a new ORCID. Even if ORCID does not find an ORCID linked to your email address, the registry will try to match possible ORCID IDs based on similar names.
You can use the Forgotten Password link on the sign-in page to reset your password.
If you no longer have access to the email address that you used to create your ORCID record (e.g. you have moved institution), the ORCID support team can help you to regain access.
Do not create a new ORCID ID. Duplicate ORCID IDs will cause problems in maintaining your record, and publications published with different ORCID IDs may not be able to be changed to pint to a single ORCID.
The ORCID Registry is designed to discourage more than one account for an individual, allowing only one ORCID ID per email address and also checking against names on registration.
If you do have more than one ORCID ID, ORCID Support can help you to link both records, and hide the duplicate.
When you connect your ORCID ID with another organisation’s system, you will be asked to grant permission to that organisation to interact with your ORCID account. You decide whether to grant to deny permission to that organisation – granting permission means that organisation will become a trusted organisation.
You can check and/or revoke permissions granted to an organisation at any time – you can do this in your account settings, simply by clicking on the icon to Revoke Access.
Examples might include:
When you grant an organisation ‘Trusted Organisation’ status, it will indicate what permissions that organisation requires and is requesting you grant it. If you do not want to grant these permissions, you are not required to do so, but you will lose out on some of the benefits of being able to automate some of the administrative activity different systems may require you to do.
See the ORCID Knowledge base for more information on ‘Trusted Organisations.’
You have control over not only what information from your ORCID record you allow to be shared with trusted organisations, but also over what parts of your record are publicly visible.
There are three visibility settings: ‘only me’, ‘trusted parties’ and ‘everyone’, and you can change the visibility for each item individually.
For more information about visibility settings, see ORCID support.
The University does not have a policy on privacy settings in your ORCID profile. You can freely decide what information can be seen by whom.
We would recommend that the “Works” section should be set to 'Public' as the most appropriate choice. Details of what publications you've written will already be in the public domain and there would not usually be any reason to hide this from view.
You can login to your ORCID account and change, delete or hide from public view any details linked to your ORCID record.
You can give permission to ‘Trusted Organisations’ to update your ORCID record with information from their records. With this permission, ORCID can import articles it finds from Scopus, Europe PMC, CrossRef and other sources.
If ORCID finds the same record in multiple sources, it will try to identify duplicates (e.g. by DOI) and create a single entry in your ORCID profile.
For a new publication, you should simply include your ORCID ID within a publisher submission system (if supported) against your name as an author. This information should be transferred by the publisher, alongside the paper DOI, to Crossref system. From Crossref, you can import the publication to your ORCID account manually, or grant permission for ORCID to import all articles associated with your ORCID from Scopus, Europe PMC and CrossRef (amongst other supported systems). See, a list of other systems supporting linking with ORCID register.
You can import publications either by adding sources of publication data as ‘Trusted Organisations’ (e.g. Crossref, Datacite, Europe PMC, Scopus, MLA Bibliography), or importing publications from a BibTeX file you have created.
If you don't work with BibTeX, don't worry. You don't need to know to use this option, and may be the quickest way to populate your ORCID from your staff profile if this already includes most of your publications. See our guide below (the second page includes the three step process to quickly create, save and import a BibTeX file to ORCID).
If you do not wish to set up a third party as a ‘trusted organisation’, you can still add works manually if you prefer.
Yes, non-Latin script character sets with Unicode encoding are supported for display and search of ORCID records and the ORCID Registry. Such citations can be added to your profile manually or imported if the exporting database supports these characters.
You can control what notifications you receive by logging in to your ORCID account and setting your preferences in your account settings.
Your ORCID will remain yours throughout your career, and you will keep the same ORCID as you move between institutions.
You are advised to update your email address linked to your ORCID before you lose access to any account associated with your current institution; you can have multiple emails associated with your ORCID. You would also be advised to update your affiliation, and if required, other details (e.g. personal website) once you have started at a new institution.
All of these changes can be managed in your account settings once you are logged in to your ORCID account.
Download a pdf of this guide here.
