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
What is ORCID? from ORCID on Vimeo.
An ORCID iD is a unique persistent identifier for researchers and scholars that stays with you throughout your career. This helps improve the discoverability of your work, connects your works, and eliminates name ambiguity.
An ORCID is important for addressing author disambiguation (different authors with the same name) and linking scholarly publications across multiple systems used by publishers, scholarly societies, funding bodies, and employing institutions. For a complete list of entities utilizing ORCID, see http://orcid.org/organizations/integrators/current.