Last year on the blog, we introduced ORCID, a non-profit organization that provides persistent, unique identifiers to researchers across the globe. ORCID iDs help ensure that researchers get credit for all their scholarly contributions.

While there are a number of different researcher identifiers out there (including ResearchID and Scopus Author ID), we recommend that all Temple researchers register for an ORCID iD. It’s free and it takes less than a minute to sign up.

There are currently 3,364,764 live ORCID iDs. Sixteen publishers, including the American Chemical Society, PLOS, and Wiley, now require that authors submit ORCID iDs at some point in the publication process. And if you think ORCID is just for scientists, you’re wrong. Cambridge University Press has begun integrating ORCID iDs into their book publishing workflows, and Taylor & Francis is currently undertaking a pilot project to integrate ORCID iDs into their humanities journals.

Researchers can use their ORCID iD profile to highlight their education, employment, publications, and grants. They can even add peer review activities. The American Geophysical Union, F1000, and IEEE are just three of the organizations that currently connect with ORCID to recognize the work of their peer reviewers.

In order to get a better sense of who is using ORCID at Temple, we looked for researchers with publicly available ORCID profiles who note “Temple University” as their current place of employment. We found 205 ORCID iDs that matched this criteria. Of those, the Lewis Katz School of Medicine has the highest number of researchers with ORCID iDs at Temple. The College of Science and Technology has the second highest number, with faculty from Physics, Chemistry, and Biology being well particularly well represented. The College of Liberal Arts has the third-highest number of ORCID iDs, thanks in large part to the Psychology department. A handful of researchers in the Fox School of Business, the College of Engineering, and the College of Education have also signed up for ORCID iDs. The overwhelming majority of researchers with ORCID iDs at Temple are faculty members. Some postdoctoral fellows have ORCID iDs, but very few graduate students do.

Because filling out one’s ORCID iD profile is optional, and profiles can also be set to private, our data is incomplete, and probably underestimates the true number of individuals at Temple with ORCID iDs. Nonetheless, it is exciting to see that researchers in almost all of Temple’s schools and colleges have signed up for ORCID iDs. We’re confident that this number will continue to grow in the future.

Temple Libraries is proud to be an institutional member of ORCID.