HSS Showcase and ORCID

Among the identifiers researchers can associate with their Showcase Profile is ORCID. ORCID, which stands for Open Researcher and Contributor ID, is a global, not-for-profit organization that strives to foster transparent and trustworthy connections between researchers, their contributions, and their affiliations by providing a unique, persistent identifier for individuals to use as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities. An ORCID ID is like an ISBN for a researcher - it allows disambiguation of researchers’ identities as authors and scholars, much like those of a library catalogue system, but is in the hands of researchers themselves.

Once created, an ORCID profile works very much like an online CV. It can document as much - or as little - detail as you wish. Furthermore, it also permits you to control who can see what data you put into your profile by three levels of access to each record within it: public, trusted, or closed. Everyone can see public information, only those you designate and trust can see your trusted information, and closed records are only available to you alone.

The data used to build an ORCID profile’s records can be supplied manually, or be drawn and collated from a variety of online open data sources that provide information publicly available through a number of databases or resources. The most important of these for our purposes are catalogues of scholarly works. Users can authorize any one of a series of data sources to share information with ORCID, and these records can help you build up your CV’s bibliographic or works section quite quickly.

ORCID Data in the Showcase

If a researcher has shared their ORCID iD in the Showcase, there will be an icon under their name at the top of their profile page:

The HSS Showcase makes use of ORCID by pulling in data for researchers’ works from the platform itself when they supply an ORCID identifier as part of their Showcase profile. It’s critical to note that the Showcase does not manage this data. We’re using ORCID entirely as a system to manage information about researcher’s works - in large part because it’s a robust platform, and because ORCID has deep links to other systems and platforms.

Managing your scholarly works on ORCID takes some time to get used to, and can involve a range of editorial interventions from ‘combining’ duplicate works, to adding records manually when they don’t appear in online data sources.

Get an ORCID ID

If you don’t have an ORCID ID, the best place to start is the ORCID for Researchers page. Here you can learn more about what ORCID is, how it functions, as well as register for a profile.

Managing Publications

ORCID allows users to combine duplicates, and designated ‘preferred’ sources for the record for a given work. This means that you can have multiple entries for something like an article, but only one has precedence. Users cannot edit records generated by datasources such as Scopes etc. In some cases even generated records for works get something wrong: if this is the case, you can combine manually added records with those created from datasources, if you wish to ‘override’ the datasource for some reason or another. Simply create a manual record, provide the correct information, and designate it as the preferred source for that work.

Fore more information on how to manage works in ORCID, see Building your ORCID record & connecting your iD.

The HSS Showcase uses ORCID data on profile pages to build publication lists from the preferred sources for each of your works. It prioritizes data in the following order:

1. Manually inserted citations in one of ORCID’s declared Bibliographic Styles: APA, MLA, Harvard, Chicago, and Vancouver
2. Manually inserted data using BIBTEX or RIS format, which is parsed to create an APA-style citation
3. DOI identifier for a work, which retrieves data and generates an APA-style citation automatically

Currently the code-base we’re using for the Showcase only permits APA, Harvard, or Vancouver styles for scenarios 2 & 3. If you want to have fine-grained control over your citations, it’s best to add one manually and provide the citation in the style you wish.

Data is drawn automatically everytime your profile is viewed in the HSS Showcase. This means that once you make a change in ORCID, it shows up in the HSS Showcase immediately.