LibGuides: ORCID & author identifiers: Link your name & your research: Home

What are author identifiers?

Author identifiers, such as ORCIDs, give you a way to reliably and unambiguously connect your names(s) with your work throughout your career, including your papers, data, biographical information, etc. This can be helpful in a number of ways:

Provides a means to distinguish between you and other authors with identical or similar names.
Links together all of your works even if you have used different names over the course of your career.
Makes it easy for others (grant funders, other researchers etc.) to find your research output.
Ensures that your work is clearly attributed to you.

ORCID IDs at MIT

ORCID at MIT takes a coordinated approach:

IS&T: Supports ORCID registration and integration with MIT identifier systems
Provost office: responsible for ORCID integration with MIT's electronic professional record for faculty and researchers
Libraries: Support research, writing, publishing, and citation management

For more information about the past 2015 rollout see this article in the Faculty Newsletter.

Why ORCID?

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) is a non-proprietary, non-profit community-based registry of research identifiers.
Links authors to their datasets and other works in addition to articles.
Authors can control what information in their ORCID profile they share. Only the ORCID ID is automatically shared. (See ORCID's privacy policy.)
It is easy to import research output from other sources (including ResearcherID, Scopus Author ID, and Datacite) to your ORCID profile.
Over 1,000 organizations have become ORCID members, including research institutions, funders, and publishers.
For more information, read our ORCID FAQs or Haak, Laurel L. et al. 2012. "ORCID: a system to uniquely identify researchers." Learned Publishing 25(4): 259-64.

ORCID at MIT

Have questions about your ORCID or author IDs?

Email orcid@mit.edu for help.