Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) is both a standard and a service to help researchers establish and maintain their scholarly identity. ORCID helps distinguish researchers with similar or identical names, differences in spellings or translations of names across languages, and changes in their name or affiliations over their career.
ORCID aims to prevent name confusion in digital collections of publications or databases. ORCIDs assign unique and persistent identifiers and manages records of researchers and their research activities including scholarly works, affiliations, and funding.
ORCID iDs are available to any scholar who is interested. The iD is a randomly-assigned, sixteen-digit number that uniquely distinguishes a researcher from all others in the world. As an example of an ORCID record, see the following (this LibGuide creator's record): orcid.org/0000-0001-8062-2763