Research & Scholarly Publications Team: ORCiD & Scopus Interoperability

ORCiD is a free service providing a persistent identifier allowing authors to bring together all of their research outputs and avoiding the confusion which can arise around authors with similar names being considered one and the same person, and the opposite problem of outputs by the same person being split among different name variants. 

Having an ORCiD ID can also help with Scopus and Pure interoperability and will assist with research funding applications, as an increasing number of research funders require an ORCiD ID as part of their application criteria.

Getting set up

Registering for an ORCiD account is free and straight forward to do. When setting up an ORCiD ID you have the option of whether the information connected with your ORCiD ID displays publicly or not. The ID itself will then consist of a randomly generated 16 digit number which is unique to your account. 

Once set up you will be able to link your ORCiD ID to your Scopus ID and LinkedIn profile. Linking to your Scopus ID is particularly beneficial as it will help address any author mismatching on the Scopus system.

Adding publications to an ORCiD ID

There are four main ways to update an ORCiD record with the details of past publications (or 'works' as they are known in ORCiD). 

1) To directly import records from other systems, including Scopus and Pure

2) Add works using an identifier such as a DOI (Digital Object Identifier)

3) Using a Bibtex file

4)  By adding works manually

For forthcoming and future publications, many publishers support the automatic import of publication information from their system to ORCiD provided the author's ORCiD ID is provided when submitting for publication. 

Interoperability between ORCiD and PURE

To link up your ORCiD ID to Pure, first login to the Pure system. Once logged click on your name / login ID which will display toward the top left of screen, then click 'edit person profile'. Once you have done this you will see an option inviting you to 'create or connect' to your ORCiD ID. Once the link is set up subsequent records created in Pure will migrate over to your ORCiD profile provided they relate to published content, have been validated and are set to 'public visibility'. The exporting of this data typically happens overnight. Your ORCiD ID will also display on your public facing Pure Portal person profile.

For past publications, ORCiD can be used as an import source. To utilise this select 'Import from online source', where ORCiD is offered as an option. The publications linked to the ORCiD ID will then display and you can import individual records to the Pure system from here. Most of the mandatory information fields should already be populated using the ORCiD data. Once the link is established you will be prompted for any new publications to import when you log into Pure which are detected via your ORCiD, unless this function is turned off. (Please note however that as we are encouraging records to get added to Pure at the point of acceptance that we would typically expect to see a record on Pure before it appears on ORCiD following publication.) 

Interoperability between ORCiD and Scopus

Records in Scopus can be migrated to ORCiD, however records in ORCiD cannot be migrated to Scopus. This is because Scopus have restrictions around what they index on their system, so not all publications will be eligible for inclusion in Scopus. 

To sync up ORCiD and Scopus first log into Scopus, using your Coventry University credentials via Open Athens or through Locate where it's recorded as a database.

Once you have found your author Scopus profile, you will see the option 'connect to ORCID'. By selecting this you will by invited to login to your ORCiD account. Once you have associated your ORCiD ID with your Scopus account you will then be able to import records from Scopus into ORCiD if any publications are missing.   

De-duplicating multiple Scopus IDs

Scopus author IDs get automatically created when Scopus indexes a publication. While Scopus does attempt to identify where the same author appears on different publications and matches them to the same author, mismatches between publications and author are still fairly common however. Mismatches often can occur if an author publishes under variations of their name (e.g. John Smith, J Smith, J.W. Smith etc.), if they move institution or change their name. 

Preventing future mismatches can be achieved by signing up for an ORCiD ID and linking it to Scopus (see above). To deal with existing duplicate Scopus IDs the simplest way to do this is by using the author feedback wizard which sits below your author profile in Scopus.

From here you will then be able to suggest that author profiles be merged if your publications are spread out over multiple author profiles in Scopus. Corrections can take a few days to a few weeks to take effect depending on the change required and degree of manual intervention needed from Scopus. If you have any difficulties please contact us at: oa.lib@coventry.ac.uk as we can act on your behalf if we know what the issues are.

For more information please see the advice given by Scopus on updating an author profile.