As a researcher you might often be asked for a publication list. This sometimes involves querying various databases to collect together all your publications. Sometimes the way in which these were published and name variants make this task very time consuming. ORCID can be a solution.

ORCID is a unique identifier that can accompany you throughout your career, as affiliations, and sometimes also names, change. Registration takes just 30 seconds and generates a unique ID that you can use every time you publish a paper. If you wish, you can add information about your affiliation and publications. You can also define whether specific data within your record will be private or public.

Co-funded by CERN, ORCID is a non-profit organisation supported by a global community of research organisations, publishers, funding agencies and professional associations. Four million researchers use ORCID, and its identifiers are already connected with tens of millions of articles and other scientific output.

Some universities and funding agencies in the CERN Member States and beyond are seeing the potential of ORCID to save time, and are suggesting that you aggregate your publications in your ORCID record. There are many ways to import this information into ORCID. Those of you mostly active in particle physics can link them in from Inspire. You can even allow Inspire to automatically update your ORCID record every time you publish in future, with nothing more to do on your side. Just remember, as publications are after all “public” actions, it is a good idea to make this part of your ORCID profile publicly available.

Several CERN experiments are also introducing ORCID to save time and to make sure all author lists and publications land in the right place in all databases. At present, a quarter of all ATLAS and CMS authors and half of NA62 authors already use ORCID. To avoid asking for the same information in many forms, CERN is considering asking users to share their ORCID, if they have one, when registering.

ORCID also comes in really handy when you have to submit papers to journals. The days of filling in form after form with the same administrative information when registering with a new publisher are now over. You can simply submit your manuscript by associating your new account with your ORCID account. If you, in addition, associate ORCID with your CERN account, you can even submit papers using your CERN credentials. Your information will “magically”  appear on the publisher side just in a few clicks. And your papers will also appear in INSPIRE quicker! From JHEP in particle physics, to IEEE for technology, there are already hundreds of journals that can save you time this way, and soon almost all journals will.

If you are involved in grant applications, it will be very useful for you to get an ORCID: more and more funding agencies are trying to make paperwork lighter and to use ORCIDs to avoid re-entering the same information many times.

Finally, if you are not yet convinced because you don’t want to remember yet another password and create yet another login, there is another advantage: you can log into ORCID with your CERN credentials. Just try!

Do not hesitate, get your unique ORCID identifier today! For any additional help with ORCID, including linking it to INSPIRE, just send an e-mail to the Scientific Information Service at library.desk@cern.ch.