v2026.1CASRAI Dictionary 1,610 entries across 24 domains · CC-BY 4.01,610 entries · CC-BY 4.0

Dictionary termTrack BStablev2026.2

Affiliation (CRIS)

In CRIS terminology, a time-bounded relationship between a Person record and an Organization Unit, capturing the role (employee, visitor, honorary, student), start and end dates, employment fraction, and other contextual attributes of the association.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 10 Jul 2026

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Examples

Worked examples

Is an instance
A current affiliation: Person X is employed by OrgUnit Y from 2020-09 to present, as Senior Research Fellow, at 1.0 FTE.
Is an instance
A historical affiliation showing a previous postdoc at another institution from 2015 to 2018.

Counter-examples

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance
A static 'department' field on a researcher's profile is not a CRIS affiliation — it lacks the temporal structure.
Not an instance
An author byline on a single paper is not, by itself, an affiliation record.

Editorial commentary

Affiliation is intrinsically a linking entity: not an attribute of the person and not an attribute of the OrgUnit, but a fact connecting the two over a period. CERIF models this explicitly. CRIS systems use this structure to answer ‘who was in this department in 2019?’ and to attribute outputs correctly (an output published in 2018 should be attributed to the affiliation in force in 2018, not to the researcher’s current affiliation). The ORCID Member API’s employment write-back also follows this pattern.

References

euroCRIS, 'CERIF Linking Entities'.

Machine-readable encodings

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="Affiliation (CRIS)"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/affiliation-cris" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/affiliation-cris",
  "name": "Affiliation (CRIS)",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/affiliation-cris",
  "description": "In CRIS terminology, a time-bounded relationship between a Person record and an Organization Unit, capturing the role (employee, visitor, honorary, student), start and end dates, employment fraction, and other contextual attributes of the association.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/research-info-systems#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/affiliation-cris",
  "sameAs": [],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-07-10T02:06:20",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}

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