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The precise identification of a person and the assignment of his/her works are becoming increasingly important in the context of open science. There is a key problem: The Internet, repositories and databases try to link activities and results of a person based on the spelling of their name. But as individual as people are, their names are unfortunately not so unique and are often written in all variations.

The ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) offers a good solution for this problem. This non-profit organization was founded in 2012 and is supported by over 100 publishers and organizations. With an ORCID you can bring together all your scientific activities and publications!

Register for a free  account at orcid.org, add all used/known spellings of your name and link to websites and social media profiles (if available). Information on education and employment can also be added.

Datenimport via Search & Link

In the Works section, you can use + Add works and Search & Link to import references directly from various sources. The ORCID can be very easily linked to the Scopus Author ID. All Scopus references are imported into your ORCID account. The Scopus Author ID is created by the Scopus database. If an author has worked and published in several places, several IDs are usually generated, since Scopus cannot merge this itself. If your references are assigned to multiple Author IDs, it is recommended to merge these IDs first before linking to the ORCID:

Merge Author Profiles	Linking Scopus Author ID with ORCID

After the data has been imported from Scopus, missing references can be added either via CrossRef (search with the DOI), from other sources or manually. Various publication types are available for manual entry. You will find the entry masks for data sets, presentations and more in the category Other.

Manual Entry

The visibility of the references can be defined individually, but it is recommended to have all references visible to everyone. This way, the corresponding data records in Web of Science are automatically enriched with the ORCID. This allows a very specific author search (use the Author Identifier field) with the ORCID in Web of Science and leads to a correct reference list. This is very important for the calculation of the h-index and citation counts.

Visibility of Records

Creating an ORCID account is easy but entering all works initially requires a considerable effort. However, maintaining and updating the ORCID account is relatively simple: Many publishers ask for the ORCID when submitting a manuscript. As soon as these papers are published, ORCID will alert you by e-mail to the new references and with your consent they will automatically be added to your ORCID account.