An ORCID iD is a 16 digit number that uniquely identifies an individual scholar. ORCID stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID. These numbers help ensure everyone gets credit for their work, by preventing confusion when people have similar names or name changes. Many manuscript, grant, and conference submission systems are asking for an ORCID—and this trend is only growing. Thankfully, it's free and easy to register an ORCID.
The ORCID organization is community-driven, open-source, open data and non-profit, and is funded by member institutions such as UCSF. Scroll to the bottom of this page for more about our membership.
From funding, to research, to publication, your ORCID ID can help you:
- Distinguish yourself from other researchers
- Get jobs, get funding, get promoted, and get recognition
- Ensure that you are accurately linked with your research, contributions, and affiliations, to get credit for your work
- Meet NIH’s ORCID requirement for research training, fellowship, research education, and career development awards
- Improve the visibility of your contributions
- Manage your reputation and research impact
- Save time on repetitive data entry for funding, publishing, and research reporting workflows
- Keep track of all of your affiliations and organizations in an interoperable, trustworthy platform throughout your career regardless of changes in name, institution, and discipline
- Register for an ORCID iD for free. Use the email address you want notifications sent to and select a unique password. Once created, link your account with your UCSF account by selecting Institutional account at sign-in to enable logging in with your UCSF credentials.
- Add information such as your education, employment, and grant funding to your ORCID record and set visibility settings. Default settings are everyone (publicly accessible) for information you provide, and only me for your email address. Additional emails may be added and used for log in by personal account. To maximize discoverability, use the everyone setting for your information.
- Connect your ORCID iD with organizations that you are affiliated with to authorize them as trusted parties. UCSF will be added as a trusted organization in the near future.
- Add your scholarly works such as publications, data sets, and conference presentations using ORCID’s Search & Link Wizards. Works can be imported from other systems, by using an identifier, by using BibTeX, or added manually. See Help topic Add works to your ORCID record.
- Add your ORCID iD to your UCSF Profiles page and other profiles you use, email signatures, when applying for funding, submitting publications, reporting your research activities, and in any research setting to make sure that you get credit for your contributions and affiliations.
Other Tips
- Have a duplicate ORCID iD? Here’s how to remove a duplicate. Be sure to transfer information you wish to keep to your primary record before removing.
For more information, visit orcid.org.
Visit our Research Impact Evaluation page for more information or to connect with a scholarly communication expert.