Research Impact

Few authors have completely unique names that allow them to be easily distinguished from others. In addition, researchers often publish under variations of their name (with or without a middle initial, for example). To further complicate matters, institutional affiliations can change over the course of a career. As a result, it is not always easy to attribute research outputs to a specific individual. In other words - you may not be getting credit for your work

ORCID is an open, non-profit, community-driven effort to create:

• An international, interdisciplinary, central registry of unique and persistent identifiers for individual researchers, and
• A way to link the identifiers with researchers' outputs and activities

Why Register for ORCID ID?

ORCID helps you to distinguish your research activities and outputs from those of other researchers with similar names (name ambiguity), and makes sure your work is currectly credited to you.  ORCID identifiers are increasingly being used by:

• Journal publishers
• Funding bodies 
• University repositories

Your ORCID identifier provides a:

• Unique, persistent identifier which you can link to your other IDs such as your Scopus Author Identifier and ResearcherID
• Profile page which can include your list of publications and publishing activities
• Profile that will follow you wherever your career takes you

How to Register or Link an Existing Account to Your NetID

Registration for an ORCID identifier is free and fast:

1) go to https://orcid.org/register and you and select "Access through your institution" 

2) Identify your institution as Dalhousie University and log in using your NetID and password

3) Select "Register now" if you are brand new to ORCid, or enter your ORCid number and password to link to your existing Dalhousie NetID for easier logging in.

 

 

Then you can easily link your ORCID and import information from other sources such as: 

• Scopus Author Identifier,
• ResearcherID,
• CrossRef

When you publish an article that is indexed by Scopus, an author profile will be automatically generated for you. If you have published under different names, at different institutions, or in different disciplines, it is possible that you will have multiple profiles that all represent you. This can be problematic for generating accurate research impact indices and counts. To consolidate these profiles go to Scopus, conduct an Author Search for your name, and if there are multiple profiles that belong to you, select them and choose "Request to merge authors," which will begin the process to merge the profiles. 

You can also connect your ORCID iD and Scopus profiles to reduce ambiguity in your public research identity. 

Note: If you are new to Dalhousie and are trying to change your affiliation to Dal, you will have to wait until you publish a paper at Dalhousie before you can make it your home institution. This is a protective measure to ensure authors are actually affiliated with the institutions they are listing. 

 

Adapted from University of California OSC: https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/12/a-social-networking-site-is-not-an-open-access-repository/.