ORCID coverage in research institutions—Readiness for partially automated research reporting

Abstract

Reporting and presentation of research activities and outcome for research institutions in official, normative standards are more and more important and are the basis to comply with reporting duties. Institutional Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) serve as important databases or data sources for external and internal reporting, which should ideally be connected with interfaces to the operational systems for automated loading routines to extract relevant research information. This investigation evaluates whether (semi-) automated reporting using open, public research information collected via persistent identifiers (PIDs) for organizations (ROR), persons (ORCID), and research outputs (DOI) can reduce effort of reporting. For this purpose, internally maintained lists of persons to whom an ORCID record could be assigned (internal ORCID person lists) of two different German research institutions—Osnabrück University (UOS) and the non-university research institution TIB—Leibniz Information Center for Science and Technology Hannover—are used to investigate ORCID coverage in external open data sources like FREYA PID Graph (developed by DataCite), OpenAlex and ORCID itself. Additionally, for UOS a detailed analysis of discipline specific ORCID coverage is conducted. Substantial differences can be found for ORCID coverage between both institutions and for each institution regarding the various external data sources. A more detailed analysis of ORCID distribution by discipline for UOS reveals disparities by research area—internally and in external data sources. Recommendations for future actions can be derived from our results: Although the current level of coverage of researcher IDs which could automatically be mapped is still not sufficient to use persistent identifier-based extraction for standard (automated) reporting, it can already be a valuable input for institutional CRIS.

Is ORCID your ID? A case study at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities of the University of Porto

“…The creation of profiles in digital identity systems is a good example of this. Baglioni et al (2021), Shillum et al (2021) and Schnieders et al (2022) point out the gap between live profiles and their completeness. The data corroborate this situation; as of 3 December 2022, there were 15,600,290 live IDs, of which only 4,572,235 included information in the 'Works' field, that is, 29.3% (ORCID, 2022).…”

“…Schnieders et al (2022) argues that the need for researcher involvement to validate, update and correct data may be the reason for the low use of ORCID. Boudry and Durand‐Barthez (2020) recognize the lack of interest of researchers in most identifiers.…”

“…This agreement entails full integration of the Portuguese resources: RCAAP, CIÊNCIA VITAE, CIÊNCIA ID, FCT and Authenticus. Schnieders et al (2022) argues that the need for researcher involvement to validate, update and correct data may be the reason for the low use of ORCID. Boudry and Durand-Barthez (2020) recognize the lack of interest of researchers in most identifiers.…”

Utilisation et usages des identifiants numériques chercheurs en France. Synthèse de l’enquête nationale 2023

“…: plateformes de soumission, agences nationales ou internationales de demandes de subventions (Citrome, 2016;Gasparyan et al, 2014)). Ce service n'est cependant pas exempt de critiques : la création du profil ORCID n'est ni encadré ni contrôlé, les chercheurs peuvent ainsi créer plusieurs profils, conduisant à des doublons (Schnieders et al, 2022;Teixeira da Silva, 2020). Certains auteurs ont également souligné qu'ORCID est vulnérable à la fraude et au piratage (Leopold, 2016).…”

“…Certains auteurs ont également souligné qu'ORCID est vulnérable à la fraude et au piratage (Leopold, 2016). Il faut signaler également la présence de profils inactifs ou obsolètes (Memon & Azim, 2019;Schnieders et al, 2022). Enfin, étant donné que les paramètres de confidentialité permettent aux chercheurs de masquer le contenu de leurs profils, certains profils peuvent être complètement privés sans contenu disponible (Craft, 2020).…”