ORCID Signups
Since launching ORCID for the Boston College community in April 2017, BC Libraries has made a concerted effort to promote the service to current and incoming faculty, students, and researchers. We have relied heavily on the relationships that our departmental liaison librarians have with their colleagues to encourage ORCID adoption at Boston College.
Our liaison to the Biology department, Enid Karr, has had a strong relationship with her department since well before the launch of ORCID, which might have influenced the goal by the Chair of the Biology department to have 100% ORCID sign-up for both faculty and graduate students.
While meeting with the incoming Biology graduate students during orientation, Enid took time to exclusively highlight ORCID and its benefits, and as a result every one of them has signed up for an ORCID iD through the BC Create or Connect application. This is the first department to have 100% of their incoming graduate students sign up at the outset of their research careers.
ORCID benefits early career researchers substantially. In the near term, Boston College Libraries asks all graduating students to voluntarily create an ORCID if they did not provide one when submitting their thesis and dissertation (ETD). Having an ORCID already created at the time of submission will help streamline the process. Beyond BC, in addition to providing them with a unique, persistent identifier throughout their career, it allows them to share all of their work in a single place with publisher verified citations. When an ORCID profile is connected to a publisher database such and Web of Science or Scopus, articles they publish in journals included in those databases will automatically appear on their ORCID profiles. This enhances the student’s visibility in their field at the outset of their careers – when each work they complete is so important to building that foundation.
ORCID is not just useful for early career researchers. Researchers at all points in their career can benefit from having a public profile that showcases their work. Unlike other academic profiles, ORCIDs stay the same through name changes, position changes, changes in field of research, etc. ORCIDs are increasingly required by publishers and funding agencies in lieu of or as a supplement to biosketches. We encourage everyone at BC to sign up for one at bc.edu/orcid. For more information on ORCID and what Boston College is doing with them, please visit our ORCID guide.
