ORCID Featured Works

A record is using ORCID Featured Works when the iD holder has designated one or more of their public works (up to a maximum of five) to appear in a dedicated "Featured" section at the top of the Works list on their ORCID record, each marked with a star icon. Featuring is a curation layer applied on top of an already-public work: only works whose visibility is already set to "Everyone" are eligible to be featured, and a work is automatically removed from the Featured list the moment its visibility is changed away from public. As of verification, the feature applies to the Works section only — there is no equivalent "Featured" mechanic for Employment, Education, Funding, Peer Review, or Distinctions entries on the record.

ByCASRAI Editorial Board

· Last updated 18 Jul 2026

Worked examples

Is an instance

A researcher with 60 public works on their ORCID record selects their five most significant journal articles — including the one most relevant to an upcoming grant application — and marks each as Featured. All five now appear with a star icon in a dedicated section at the top of the Works list, ahead of the other 55 entries, without those other entries being hidden, deleted, or made private.

Is an instance

A researcher features a dataset that is set to visibility "Everyone." Later, they change that dataset's visibility to "Trusted Parties" (for example, to restrict it to a specific funder-review workflow). ORCID automatically drops the dataset from the Featured list, since a work must remain publicly visible to stay featured; the researcher would need to select a replacement public work if they want a fifth item featured again.

Looks similar, but isn't

Not an instance

A researcher wants to feature an unpublished manuscript they have added to their record with visibility set to "Only Me" (private). This is not possible — ORCID only permits featuring works that are already visible to "Everyone"; a private work must first be made public before it becomes eligible to be featured at all.

Not an instance

A researcher's ORCID record shows a prominent Employment entry at their current institution near the top of their profile. This is not an instance of Featured Works — the Featured mechanic is scoped specifically to the Works section as of verification, so ordering or prominence in the Employment/Education/Funding sections of the record is governed by ORCID's standard chronological/entry-order display, not by the Featured curation tool.

ORCID Featured Works is a profile-curation feature on the ORCID record: an iD holder can select up to five of their public works to display in a dedicated, star-marked “Featured” section at the top of their Works list, ahead of everything else on the record. ORCID introduced the feature on October 30, 2025, describing it as giving highlighted publications “premium real estate” on an otherwise chronologically or manually ordered works list that, for a researcher with a long publication history, can otherwise bury the outputs that matter most for a given audience.

How featuring works

Featuring is layered on top of, not a substitute for, ORCID’s existing visibility permissions. Only a work already set to visibility “Everyone” (public) is eligible to be featured; works set to “Trusted Parties” or “Only Me” cannot be featured until their visibility is changed to public. If a featured work’s visibility is later changed away from public, ORCID automatically removes it from the Featured list — the two settings are linked in one direction (visibility gates featuring) but not the other (featuring does not change or lock visibility).

The cap is five works. There is no mechanism to feature more than five simultaneously; adding a sixth requires first un-featuring one of the existing five. This keeps the section functioning as a genuine highlights reel rather than a re-sortable full list.

What it does and does not affect

Featuring changes display and ordering only. It does not alter a work’s work assertion metadata, does not affect whether the work counts toward any external indexing or reporting process that reads from the ORCID record via the ORCID API, and does not delete, hide, or demote the non-featured works — they remain fully present and visible in the Works list below the Featured section, in their normal order.

As of verification, the Featured mechanic is scoped to the Works section specifically. ORCID’s record model separates Works from other professional-activity sections — Employment, Education, Qualification, Invited position, Distinction, Membership, and Service (the affiliation types), plus Funding and Peer Review — and none of those sections currently has an equivalent “Featured” curation option; their display order follows ORCID’s standard entry-order rules instead.

Why it matters for research administration

For institutions and CRIS systems that pull data from ORCID records via the ORCID API, Featured status is a display-layer signal, not a data field most integrations currently key off — the underlying work entry and its persistent identifiers are unchanged regardless of whether it is featured. For individual researchers, ORCID frames the practical value around grant applications, job searches, and collaboration discovery: a reviewer or search committee skimming a long ORCID profile sees the researcher’s own selection of their most significant outputs first, without needing to page through a complete publication history sorted by date or manual order.

Related terms

See also the broader guide How to Register, Find, and Search for ORCID iDs, which covers Featured Works as part of the full record-setup process alongside affiliations, works import, and privacy settings.

Use in your systems

JATS XML <role> element

xml

<role vocab="credit"
      vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
      vocab-term="ORCID Featured Works"
      vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/orcid-featured-works" />

Schema.org DefinedTerm (JSON-LD)

json

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "DefinedTerm",
  "@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/orcid-featured-works",
  "name": "ORCID Featured Works",
  "identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/orcid-featured-works",
  "description": "A record is using ORCID Featured Works when the iD holder has designated one or more of their public works (up to a maximum of five) to appear in a dedicated \"Featured\" section at the top of the Works list on their ORCID record, each marked with a star icon. Featuring is a curation layer applied on top of an already-public work: only works whose visibility is already set to \"Everyone\" are eligible to be featured, and a work is automatically removed from the Featured list the moment its visibility is changed away from public. As of verification, the feature applies to the Works section only — there is no equivalent \"Featured\" mechanic for Employment, Education, Funding, Peer Review, or Distinctions entries on the record.",
  "inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/persistent-identifiers#set",
  "url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/orcid-featured-works",
  "sameAs": [],
  "license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
  "publisher": {
    "@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
  },
  "dateModified": "2026-07-18T00:05:54",
  "inLanguage": "en"
}