ORCID growth and field-wise dynamics of adoption: A case study of the Toulouse scientific area

Authors : Marie-Dominique Heusse, Guillaume Cabanac

Research-focused information systems harvest and promote the scientific output of researchers. Disambiguating author identities is key when disentangling homonyms to avoid merging several persons’ records.

ORCID offers an identifier to link one’s identity, affiliations and bibliography. While funding agencies and scholarly publishers promote ORCID, little is known about its adoption rate. We introduce a method to quantify ORCID adoption according to researchers’ discipline and occupation in a higher-education organization.

We semi-automatically matched the 6,607 staff members affiliated to the 145 labs of the Toulouse scientific area with the 7.3 million profiles at orcid.org. The observed ORCID adoption of 41.8% comes with discipline-wise disparities. Unexpectedly, only 48.3% of all profiles listed at least one work and profiles with no works might just have been created to get an identifier.

Those ‘empty’ profiles are of little interest for the entity disambiguation task. To our knowledge, this is the first study of ORCID adoption at the scale of a multidisciplinary scientific metropole. This method is replicable and future studies can target other cases to contrast the dynamics of ORCID adoption worldwide.

URL : ORCID growth and field-wise dynamics of adoption: A case study of the Toulouse scientific area

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.1451

We Can Make a Better Use of ORCID: Five Observed Misapplications

Authors : Miriam Baglioni, Paolo Manghi, Andrea Mannocci, Alessia Bardi

Since 2012, the “Open Researcher and Contributor ID” organisation (ORCID) has been successfully running a worldwide registry, with the aim of “providing a unique, persistent identifier for individuals to use as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities”.

Any service in the scholarly communication ecosystem (e.g., publishers, repositories, CRIS systems, etc.) can contribute to a non-ambiguous scholarly record by including, during metadata deposition, referrals to iDs in the ORCID registry.

The OpenAIRE Research Graph is a scholarly knowledge graph that aggregates both records from the ORCID registry and publication records with ORCID referrals from publishers and repositories worldwide to yield research impact monitoring and Open Science statistics.

Graph data analytics revealed “anomalies” due to ORCID registry “misapplications”, caused by wrong ORCID referrals and misexploitation of the ORCID registry. Albeit these affect just a minority of ORCID records, they inevitably affect the quality of the ORCID infrastructure and may fuel the rise of detractors and scepticism about the service.

In this paper, we classify and qualitatively document such misapplications, identifying five ORCID registrant-related and ORCID referral-related anomalies to raise awareness among ORCID users.

We describe the current countermeasures taken by ORCID and, where applicable, provide recommendations. Finally, we elaborate on the importance of a community-steered Open Science infrastructure and the benefits this approach has brought and may bring to ORCID.

URL : We Can Make a Better Use of ORCID: Five Observed Misapplications

DOI : http://doi.org/10.5334/dsj-2021-038

Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Under the Context of Research Data Librarianship

AuthorJia Liu

A digital object identifier (DOI) is an increasingly prominent persistent identifier in finding and accessing scholarly information. This paper intends to present an overview of global development and approaches in the field of DOI and DOI services with a slight geographical focus on Germany.

At first, the initiation and components of the DOI system and the structure of a DOI name are explored. Next, the fundamental and specific characteristics of DOIs are described and DOIs for three (3) kinds of typical intellectual entities in the scholar communication are dealt with; then, a general DOI service pyramid is sketched with brief descriptions of functions of institutions at different levels.

After that, approaches of the research data librarianship community in the field of RDM, especially DOI services, are elaborated. As examples, the DOI services provided in German research libraries as well as best practices of DOI services in a German library are introduced; and finally, the current practices and some issues dealing with DOIs are summarized. It is foreseeable that DOI, which is crucial to FAIR research data, will gain extensive recognition in the scientific world.

URL : Digital Object Identifier (DOI) Under the Context of Research Data Librarianship

DOI : https://doi.org/10.7191/jeslib.2021.1180

Accuracy of PubMed-based author lists of publications and use of author identifiers to address author name ambiguity: a cross-sectional study

Authors : Paul Sebo, Sylvain de Lucia, Nathalie Vernaz

Objective

To assess the accuracy of PubMed-based author lists of publications and use of author identifiers to address author name ambiguity.

Methods

In this Swiss study conducted in 2019, 300 hospital-based senior physicians were asked to generate a list of their publications in PubMed and complete a questionnaire (type of query used, number of errors in their list of publications, knowledge and use of ORCID and ResearcherID).

Results

156 physicians (52%) agreed to participate, 145 of whom published at least one article (mean number of publications: 60 (SD 73)). Only 17% used the advanced search option. On average, there were 5 articles in the lists that were not co-authored by participants (advanced search: 1.0 (SD 2.6) vs. 5.9 (SD 13.9), p value 0.02) and 3 articles co-authored by participants that did not appear in the lists (advanced search: 1.5 (SD 2.0) vs. 3.6 (SD 8.4), p-value 0.05). Although 82% were aware of ORCID, only 16% added all their articles (39% and 6% respectively for ResearcherID).

Conclusions

When used by senior physicians, the advanced search in PubMed is accurate for retrieving authors’ publications. Author identifiers are only used by a minority of physicians and are therefore not recommended in this context, as they would lead to inaccurate results.

URL : Accuracy of PubMed-based author lists of publications and use of author identifiers to address author name ambiguity: a cross-sectional study

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03845-3