ORCiD
a brief intro
Forgive me...
for being presumptive, but there is a general expectation that – assuming you are entering a career as an academic – you will eventually be sharing the products of your work.
You want your work to be known and discoverable; accessible to the folks who might benefit from it.
I would think (hope).
And, you'd probably like it to be attributed to you, since you did the work and also since the implications of its value will have some impact on your career.
I suspect...
this may seem weird because, depending on where you are in your career, you are maybe not used to doing this.
After all, most of the experience of dissemination as a student is submitting papers to one person who grades them.
It is certainly fine if this is the case. It's very normal. Fun fact, plenty of established researchers don't really think too hard about where and how their work is shared, either.
When you submit a paper for a class, this is what happens. This is where your research so far has gone, for the most part.
https://science.gc.ca/site/science/en/open-science
As you progress through your career, submitting your work kicks off an enormous Rube Goldberg machine of scholarly publishing infrastructure. We're talking data, articles, preprints, presentations, proceedings, and countless other things.
Your work is going to end up in a lot of places, often without you even really being aware of it.
You certainly know what you worked on, but people looking for your work might not.
Maybe you share a name with another researcher and your results are always co-mingled. Or your field only uses first name initials.
Or, maybe you changed your name, and it's painful or unpleasant that all your old publications require others to know it.
Solutions for Problems
A lot of the time, when I'm talking to researchers about a service or platform or practice they should care about, they look at me with a very recognizable facial expression.
"I don't have this problem, and I don't know why you're telling me solutions for a problem I am confident I do not have."
But, unless your name is wildly unique, I'm here to tell you that accurate, reliable attribution can definitely be a problem.
Even this required a student id number.
All researchers need to talk about the work they've done. Often. Repeatedly. And, all researchers benefit from clear, unambiguous attribution.
Unambiguous Attribution is what ORCiD is all about.
For example...
I might write my own name as:
- Mike Nason
- Michael Nason
- Michael Thomas William Nason
- Michael T. Nason
- M. Nason
- mnason
- ahemnason
And! There may be more than one of any of these! The more variations and folks with the same name there are, the harder it is to find the stuff I've done.
For example...
I might write my own name as:
- Mike Nason
- Michael Nason
- Michael Thomas William Nason
- Michael T. Nason
- M. Nason
- mnason
- ahemnason
I may even have to format my name in a specific way because of a journal's citation style. Or because of the way their submission form lets me insert metadata.
Now, imagine my name was:
Alejandro Casas Niño de Rivera
For example...
I might write my own name as:
- Mike Nason
- Michael Nason
- Michael Thomas William Nason
- Michael T. Nason
- M. Nason
- mnason
- ahemnason
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5527-8489 will take you to all of my works, no matter what my name metadata was on the publication. And publishers/platforms will link it, so people are lead to my publishing record.
https://info.orcid.org/what-is-orcid/
- Your ORCiD is free.
- It isn't tied to an institution, it's tied to you.
- It can be tied to other services so that it automatically populates as you publish.
- You decide what's visible and what isn't, and to whom.
- You can allow or withdraw connection permissions whenever you want.
- It will, sooner or later, save you significant time.