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Researcher Profiles, Identifiers and Social Networks: Maximise your Impact

Tips on how to promote your research and profile as a researcher.

What is ORCID?

ORCID stands for: Open Researcher and Contributor ID and is an open, non-profit, community-driven effort to create:

  • An international, interdisciplinary, central registry of unique and persistent identifiers for individual researchers, and
  • A way to link the identifiers with researchers' outputs and activities.

An ORCID identifier will help you to distinguish your research activities and outputs from those of other researchers with similar names, and make sure you get credit for your work.

ORCID identifiers are increasingly being used by:

ORCID identifier provides a:

  • Unique, persistent identifier which you can link to your other IDs such as your Scopus Author Identifier and Publons (ResearcherID)
  • Profile page which can include your: list of publications, employment history, research interests and links to other profiles.

Please note: ORCID does not track citations and your ORCID profile will not include citation counts.


 

ORCID Requirements at the University of Melbourne: Academic Staff & Graduate Researchers

 

All academic staff should:

  • Register for an ORCID if they do not already have one
  • Connect their ORCID to their Elements account.

Taking these steps will:

  • Facilitate the disambiguation of researchers and research outputs
  • Enable linking and reuse of high quality, persistent data (e.g. research outputs, grants)
  • Reduce the number of outputs that need to be manually claimed in Elements

For more information see the ORCID Registration and Connection page in the Research Gateway. This page provides instructions for linking and configuring your ORCID connection in Elements. The default connection is to "read" data from your ORCID account in order to harvest research outputs into your Elements profile. However, you can choose to "write" to ORCID, which allows you to send your research outputs from your Elements profile to your ORCID profile. This is of most benefit for academics whose research outputs are primarily manually added, rather than harvested from external data sources.

University of Melbourne staff can also access the ORCID guide for instructions on linking ORCID to other research identifiers.

All University of Melbourne graduate researchers are required to include an ORCID on the title page of their thesis. See Preparation of Graduate Research Theses Rules.

Academic staff and graduate researchers should add their ORCID when submitting:

  • article manuscripts to editors (and publishers' article submission systems)
  • grant applications to funding agencies (eg ARC & NHMRC)
  • thesis, conference papers, presentations and posters
  • books and book chapters manuscripts to publishers

     

How to register for an ORCID identifier

Registration for an ORCID identifier is free and fast.

Academic staff and graduate researchers (Doctorate, PhD, Masters Research) should register via Elements. For further instructions visit the ORCID Registration and Connection page on Staff Hub. 

Undergraduate, Honours and Coursework Masters students should register at orcid.org 

NOTE: If you have more than one university email address, it is important that you make sure that your ORCID profile has all your email addresses associated with it to avoid duplicate ORCID identifiers being created.

You can then link your ORCID identifier to, and import information from, other sources such as: 

  • Scopus Author Identifier,
  • Publons (ResearcherID),
  • CrossRef, and
  • Australian National Data Service (ANDS).

Once you have registered you can include your ORCID identifier:

  • On your webpage,
  • When you submit your thesis, publications or apply for grants, and 
  • In any research workflow to ensure you get credit for your work.

     

ARC RMS and your ORCID profile (Keeping your ORCID profile up to date)

If you are applying for a grant you will need to include your ORCID. The ARC have integrated ORCID with their RMS, enabling researchers to  provide a curated list of publications with a few clicks, rather than providing lengthy documents. 

Ensure that your ORCID profile reflects your publication output accurately at grant time by:

For more support on using ORCID to populate ARC RMS, see Research Outputs and the ARC RMS service page on the Research Gateway.


 

Importing records to ORCID from Elements

Due to enhanced system functionality, you no longer need to import records to ORCID from Elements through a bibtex file.

Instead, you can upgrade your connection in Elements so that it "writes" to ORCID.

Upgrading the level of your integration to 'read from and write publication data to my ORCID account’ will mean outputs added to Elements will also be sent to your ORCID profile.  This is of most benefit for academics whose research outputs are primarily manually added, rather than harvested from external sources.  These outputs will now only need to be added once, in Elements, for them to appear in both Elements and ORCID.

For step by step instructions, please visit the Writing to ORCID from Elements guide on the Research Gateway.

Note: If you connected your ORCID to Elements before the functionality to write to ORCID was introduced in 2021, you will need to reconnect your ORCID to authorise Elements to write to ORCID.


 

Import records from Google Scholar to ORCID

It's very simple to import records from your Google Scholar profile into your ORCID profile.

  • Go to https://scholar.google.com.au/
  • Click "My profile"
  • Select the publications that you want to export
  • Click Export  
  • Select BibTex
  • Go to File - Save Page As save the page as a .txt file

 

Go to ORCID

  • Click +Add Works
    • Import BibTex
      • Choose file
      • Select the .txt file
      • Open
    • You can then save all the records, or delete any you don't wish to appear on your profile.