ORCID identifier adoption in Spanish scholarly communication: A macro and micro level perspective

Abstract

Personal identifiers have become essential for unambiguously identifying authors and their scholarly output. One of the top personal identifiers is ORCID because of its open, cross‐national, cross‐disciplinary nature. This study analyses ORCID adoption at two levels: (a) Spanish scientific articles in Web of Science (WoS), to explore ORCID presence in articles; and (b) European Research Council (ERC) grant recipients who are affiliated with a Spanish host institution, to explore the prevalence of ORCID‐iDs, profile completion, and differences by gender, field, and funding scheme. Nearly 90% of Spanish scientific articles list at least one ORCID‐iD, but only 14% of articles include an ORCID‐iD for all authors. Implementation is therefore still limited, especially in the humanities. Concerning the micro‐level, all ERC grantees have an ORCID‐iD and an associated profile, which is generally public. Profiles include information in an average of four sections. ‘Works’ and ‘Employment’ are the sections most frequently completed. Fifty percent of profiles were updated in the last month, which suggests rapid updating. Factors influencing ORCID adoption and profile completion are discussed. Publisher and journal policies play a significant role by asking authors for ORCID‐iDs and will be crucial in increasing the identifier's adoption.

Exploring ORCID adoption and metadata presence in Spain's research landscape

“…This suggests that while ORCID is a valuable tool, its potential is not being fully realized due to partially completed and private profiles (Wang et al, 2024). Besides, as ORCID is recognized as potentially playing a crucial role in preventing authorship fraud (Teixeira da Silva, 2023), the interoperability with other databases and automatic updating of profiles by other entities in the research ecosystem (such as institutions, publishers, and funders) could significantly improve the completeness of metadata, thereby increasing the reliability of ORCID to carried out this type of studies (Teixeira da Silva, 2022;Bordons et al, 2024).…”

“…To date, we know that in Spain, found that the ORCID identifier is included in most articles published in Q1 and Q2 Spanish open access journals, with a predominant presence in Q1 journals, and that the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) is the leading Spanish scientific publisher that has adopted it in its editorial management, suggesting that the ORCID identifier could become a criterion for editorial quality (Martínez Méndez & López Carreño (2019). Bordons et al (2024) analyzed ORCID adoption in Spanish scientific articles and among ERC grant recipients in Spain. They found that almost 90% of articles list at least one ORCID ID, but only 14% include ORCID IDs for all authors.…”

“…Although the adoption of ORCID as a PID for unique author identification is becoming increasingly common (Haak et al, 2012), there are several challenges that researchers face when working with ORCID as a data source for scientometric studies. For example, there is a significant lack of adoption and completeness in ORCID records that varies across disciplines (Fernández-Marcial et al, 2023), the hard sciences tend to lead in adoption and completeness, in contrast to the social sciences, arts, and humanities (Boudry & Durand-Barthez, 2020;Bordons et al, 2024), and also across countries which leads to biases in coverage (Youtie et al, 2017). Previous studies have identified quality data issues such as empty records, problems with homonyms, sections with outdated data, multiple profiles for the same author (Heusse & Cabanac, 2022;Wang et al, 2024); the occurrence of duplicate and fake profiles Teixeira da Silva, 2021a;2021c), the creation of profiles by personnel not directly linked to research (Heusse & Cabanac, 2022), regular update of profiles (Costas et al, 2022), misidentification of authors and their associated institutions (Martínez-Méndez & Lopez-Carreño, 2019), the creation of "silent" or 'ghost' profiles (Teixeira da Silva, 2021a;Wang et al, 2024) and the limitations in data verification (Wang et al, 2024).…”