Understanding ORCID

It has grown increasingly difficult to:

• Track different forms of a researcher’s name across different information systems;
• Distinguish between different researchers with the same or very similar names;
• Identify ALL scholarly works associated with a specific researcher.

Researcher names can be ambiguous for many reasons. People who have published under common names, maiden names, abbreviations, or names including non-Roman characters may encounter difficulties in being discovered online. ORCIDs clarify this ambiguity by providing a unique identifier for each an every researcher.

The following example illustrates the number of ways that a single person's name could be rendered in publications and research outputs.(Slide by Mogens Sandfær of DEFF).