As the number of researchers is growing around the world, the necessity of name disambiguation increases. For instance, if your name is John Doe, Yu Wang or Pierre Martin, you really need to distinguish yourself and your work from the works of your homonyms. Same kind of problem appears if you get married and change your father’s name for your husband’s : you will have to make a link between the output that was yours before you got married and the papers you have written or contributed to since then. Besides indexers are often confused with names in other languages and particularly with asian names : first and last names are commonly switched together (e.g Li Bai : if you do not speak chinese, what are the chances you would recognise in these two names the family name?)

ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) was created in 2011 by a consortium of commercial publishers and research institutions not only to answer to but also to make possible to link every article’s DOI to a personal identifier and by achieving this, to improve bibliometric tools such as Scopus or Web of Science.

ORCID make it easier for funders, publishers or recruiters to attribute all your work to the good person. But this 16 digit number will not thoroughfully resume all your past and present activity. You will need to link this identifier to others. Some of them, you will have to create them by yourself (for instance : once you have deposited your first draft or publication in HAL, take some time to forge your IDHal and like it to your ORCID, ResearchGate ID or twitter ID, if your have one of these)...Some of the will be attributed to you by institutions, mostly libraries : have you ever heard about ISNI or VIAF ?

Let us focus on Idref : as soon as a librarian will make your dissertation available on the french academic catalog (SUDOC), you will automatically get a specific ID called IDRef (which can be seen on www.idref.fr). ORCID was made to disambiguate authors of papers, conferences, datasets, whatever can be published by a commercial scientific publisher. The dissertation you have deposited on your university’s repository after acceptance is not part of what can be attributed to an ORCID. That is why, you should link your IDREF to your ORCID in order to provide a complete bibliography on the web.

Below is the ORCID profile of a colleague who trains PhD students among other things to increase their visibility on the web:

You can manage the visibility settings of every part of your profile (to everyone, to trusted parties, only to me) so that you keep the control of your privacy