What is ORCID?

ORCID provides a unique, persistent digital identifier (an ORCID ID) that you own and control, and that distinguishes you from every other researcher. You can connect your ID with your professional information — affiliations, grants, publications, peer review, and more. You can use your ID to share your information with other systems, ensuring you get recognition for all your contributions, saving you time and hassle, and reducing the risk of errors.

ORCID has become the de-facto international standard for unique researcher identifiers, and is used in many key research processes such as submission of manuscripts, application for grants, and management of research information. ORCID identifiers are now mandated by many funding and research institutions in order to aid their internal record keeping and processes in this way.

What are the connections between Dimensions and ORCID?

Dimensions is using ORCID, amongst other information, to aid researcher disambiguation and to provide additional information about researchers on their automatically generated Dimensions profiles. Separately, researchers can also use Dimensions to add publications to their ORCID record with one click, and with the DimensionsWizard for ORCID we provide another free and open service which allows researchers to add grants from the Dimensions database to their ORCID record quickly and easily. Find out more about how to use the DimensionsWizard.

How can I claim publications for my ORCID record through Dimensions?

As a researcher you can use Dimensions to add publications to your ORCID record:

  1. Make sure you’re signed in to Dimensions. If you are not signed in already, sign in or create an account and then sign in.
  2. Authenticate with ORCID. Click on your name in the top navigation bar and select “Connect with ORCID”. Follow the instructions: You will be asked to login to ORCID and grant Dimensions access to your ORCID record, allowing us to update your record.
  3. Claim papers. On both the publication results list and all publication details pages in Dimensions you will see “Add to ORCID” buttons. You can now search for specific publications or your name or profile to find your publications in Dimensions. Claim publications individually by clicking the “Add to ORCID” button.

This functionality is currently only available with publications data. The ability to add other work to ORCID from Dimensions, such as grants, patents and clinical trials, may be added in the future.

If I add publications to my ORCID profile through linking my ORCID to Dimensions, will they automatically be added to my researcher profile page in Dimensions?

No, this is not the case. The linking is currently unidirectional, from Dimensions to ORCID.

ORCID is only one source of information that we use to aid our researcher disambiguation, and we are not able to simply "copy over" the publications from ORCID records for researcher profile pages. However, having a fully updated ORCID record with the information set to be publicly available will greatly increase your chances of being represented accurately in a single researcher profile with the correct publications assigned in Dimensions.

My Dimensions profile does not show the link to ORCID. How can I add this?

Currently, it is not possible to manually add other external profiles, such as ORCID, to a researcher profile in Dimensions. This link is established automatically as part of our disambiguation process which cross-checks publications metadata against the publicly available ORCID data. Connecting your ORCID profile to your Dimensions user account via the method described above does not also link your ORCID record to your Dimensions researcher profile.

Which information is Dimensions pulling from ORCID into my Dimensions profile?

If our author disambiguation process has found a match and established a link between your Dimensions profile and your ORCID record, the following information will be retrieved from ORCID and displayed in your Dimensions profile:

  • Link to your ORCID profile on the Dimensions profile details page
  • "Biography" section
  • "Employment" section
  • "Education [and qualifications]" section