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ORCID @ W&M

A persistent, automatically updated record of your scholarly work

I've got an ORCID iD. What do I do now?

I've got an ORCID iD. What do I do now?

  1. Verify your email, if you haven't already
  2. Understand and choose your Privacy and Visibility settings
  3. Add a non-W&M email address to your ORCID account to ensure you don't lose access if you change institutions
  4. Fill in your researcher bio
    • ORCID has fields for your email addresses, websites, names, keywords, and countries, but does not ask for a display gender, age, or ethnicity
    • All of the information you input can be privacy controlled
    • You control your preferred name and preferred sources for information
  5. Update your account
    • Import citations from databases Search & Link
    • Manually add works to your ORCID record

[Image created by ORCID and used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.]

1. Use Your ORCID iD

ORCID logo 64x64  Make Your Identifier Part of Your Workflow

The most important thing to do with an ORCID iD is use it! Add your ORCID iD to email signatures, online profiles, manuscript submissions, peer reviews, grant applications, and more. If a journal or conference you are submitting to does not have a way to include an ORCID iD with your information, consider contacting the editors or organizers and requesting that they make it an option.

2. Verify Your Email Address

Verify Your Email Address

From the ORCID blog:

To ensure that you and only you (or those to whom you have granted permission) can access and manage your record... a verified email address is required to access key features of your ORCID record.

Verifying your primary email address allows you to:

Verifying is not required in order to:

  • Add and edit your name and name variations
  • Change your account settings
  • Update your email addresses
  • Connect your ORCID iD to other systems and authorize them to read and update your ORCID record
  • Change the visibility of data that other systems have added to your ORCID record, or delete that data

For more on how (and why) to verify your primary email address, see the ORCID Support site.

3. Controlling Privacy and Visibility

You're In Control

Researcher control over access to and visibility of data is a fundamental principle of ORCID. There are three visibility settings that you can use for items in your profile:

 Everyone

Information marked as "everyone" is public. It is visible to anyone who looks at your profile or uses ORCID's public API.

 Trusted parties

Information marked as "trusted parties" is limited. It is only visible to trusted organizations that you have granted explicit permission to access your ORCID record.

 Only me

Information marked as "only me" is private. It is only visible to you after you have logged in.

For more information about ORCID and privacy, see their page on visibility settings and their privacy policy.

4. Biography and Details

Add Only What You Want

Fill out your ORCID profile with as much or as little information as you want. In addition to publications and other works, you might want to include:

  • biography
  • education
  • employment
  • keywords
  • alternate names
  • website(s)
  • email address(es)

You are not required to provide demographic data (age, gender, ethnicity), and all information you add is under your control. Each section and entry can be set as public, limited, or private: you decide what to enter and what to display publicly. Establish the preferred form of your name, hide your old email addresses, or improve your findability with keywords.