Maintaining a robust online profile, particularly through platforms like ORCID, holds significant advantages for researchers, including:
- Visibility, Recognition, and Collaboration: A comprehensive online profile elevates your visibility within the academic community, bolstering credibility and attracting attention from peers, institutions, and even journalists. This increased visibility can also serve as a magnet for talented graduate students seeking mentorship opportunities.
- Author Name Disambiguation: You may have publications under various name variants or initials throughout your careers. By consolidating all research outputs under a single ORCID identifier, you can claim ownership of their entire body of work, regardless of name changes or variations you used in past publications. Further, ORCID provides a unique identifier that remains consistent throughout an academic career, independent of institutional affiliations. This ensures continuity and ease of tracking research outputs, even when transitioning between institutions.
- Impact Measurement: Platforms like Web of Science and Scopus provide metrics that quantify and showcase the impact of your research, aiding in academic job searches, tenure evaluations, grant applications, and career advancement.
- Resource Discovery: A centralized online profile serves as a repository for accessing publications, datasets, and other scholarly outputs, facilitating knowledge dissemination and accessibility.
- Work Efficiencies: Using ORCID reduces the amount of manual data entry you have to do through automatic harvesting of associated activities and objects.
- Funder and Publisher Requirements: Grant funding agencies, increasingly require ORCID identifiers as part of grant applications. This streamlines the application process, enhances data accuracy, and enables research organizations to accurately identify applicants. As well, publishers are also integrating ORCID identifiers into manuscript submission systems and peer-review processes to improve authorship attribution accuracy. Using an ORCID identifier can expedite manuscript handling, and publishers can automatically update authors' ORCID profiles upon manuscript acceptance and publication.
For more assistance contact :
Qing Liu, Bibliometrics and Research Impact Analyst, Western Research for additional support on integrating researcher profile metrics into grant applications, award nominations, etc.,
Joanne Paterson, or RSCLIB@uwo.ca Research & Scholarly Communication Team , Western Libraries for assistance with populating or verifying various researcher identifiers, publishing, open access publishing, etc.
