Scholarly Impact Challenge

Luckily, some smart people have been working to make name disambiguation easy.

ORCiDs (or ORCID iDs if you like redundancy) are permanent, unique identifiers for researchers. They protect your unique identity and help you keep your publication record up-to-date with very little effort.

An ORCID iD is increasingly requested by publishers, funding agencies, and others that want to ensure that publications, funding, and other forms of scholarly work are accurately associated with you. Getting it done now means you don't have to worry about it later!

Setting up your ORCID profile will help you claim your correct, complete publication record. In this challenge, you'll register (or update) your ORCID.

First, head to ORCID.org/register and sign up for an ORCID account.

At this step in the process, you’ll add very basic information like your name and email address, choose a default level of privacy for your profile, accept ORCID’s terms of use, and click “Register”.

If your name is already in the ORCID system, the site will prompt you to claim an existing profile or make a new one.

Congratulations! You now have an ORCID identifier. And, now you’re on your way to having an ORCID profile, too.

Any type of scholarly output you create, ORCID can handle.

Are you a traditional scientist, who writes only papers and the occasional book chapter? ORCID can track them.

Not a scientist at all, but an art professor? You can import information about your works using ORCID as well.

In some cases, ORCID will even import information about your service to your discipline!

You can add information in three ways: 

• Link your works from another system (recommended).
• Import a BibTeX file of your works.
• Enter your works manually.

To link your works from another system, choose Search & Link from the Add Works portion of your ORCID record. You can then select a database that's likely to contain most of your published work. We recommend CrossRef as a great interdisciplinary choice; it will have all bibliographic info for works with a DOI. See this ORCID explainer or watch this video (1:51) for more detailed instructions. 
 

ORCID strongly recommends using its Search & Link wizard since it will reduce or eliminate data transposition errors, and also enable a reliable link between your ORCID iD and your works. You can certainly use the other two options, however, if Search & Link will not work for you (e.g., your journal article does not have a DOI and is not included in any of the available databases).

You'll be prompted to add publications manually or through importing in the "Activity" section of this challenge.

ORCID may have gaps in its coverage and may not find all of your publications, all of the time, and connectable third-party services don’t always, either. That means you might have to manually add some works and information to your profile.

Your job for this challenge is to make sure your ORCID profile is set up and as complete as possible.

It’s possible that not all of your publications and other works will have imported. You can add them in a couple of other ways:

1. Add works manually by clicking the “Add manually” under “+Add works” in the Works section and adding the publications one-by-one.
2. Batch import your works using the BibTex import tool. You can export your works from many reference management services in BibTeX format, then click “Import BibTeX” while you’re hovering over “+Add works” in the Works section. Upload your BibTeX file, and you’re done!

If any duplicate records were imported with the BibTeX import, you can delete them by clicking the trashcan icon in the lower right corner of the duplicate work’s title.

Finally, add other information you want to share, such as your education information, employment history, and scholarly interests.

Tips for maxing out your ORCID iD usability:

• Make your works public for maximum visibility and discoverability -- very important!
• Add your basic biographical info, for example, education and affiliation(s), and make it public. 
• Add name variants you have used in the past.
• Use your ORCID iD when prompted in processes such as manuscript submission and grant proposals and reporting.
• Link your ORCID iD to (or include it in your profile for) your professional organizations.
• Include your ORCID iD on conference posters (generate a QR code, if you like, right from your ORCID record page) to direct people to your works.
• Consider including your ORCID iD on your webpage, in social media accounts, and in your email signature.

To display your ORCID iD in various digital and analog locations, use these tools that can be found on your record, just under your name:

• ORCID is institution-neutral. Your ORCID stays the same and travels with you no matter where you go. So, if you’re a graduate student at Eastern, go ahead and register your ORCID with your EMU email address. Later, should your email address change, you can associate your new email address and identity with your existing ORCID. This way, ORCID’s record of your work and scholarly identity will remain stable, even if your affiliation, email address, or name changes.
   
• ORCID privileges the autonomy, authority, and privacy of each researcher. That means that only you can register an ORCID on your own behalf (EMU cannot do this for you, nor can any other institution). Only you can control what information is visible on your ORCID profile and to whom. And only you can authorize third-party applications to read from or write to your ORCID profile.
   
• With your permission, ORCID is ready and waiting to pull in information about your work from other sources, which can save time and effort when filling out your profile.

Content for this challenge has been derived from the OU Impact Challenge, the University of Maine's Research Impact Challenge, and Emory University's Scholarly Impact 5-Day Challenge, all of which are licensed CC BY 4.0.