Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A record listing 23 publications, 2 employments (current and previous), one PhD, and three funded grants.
- Is an instance
An institutional HR system writing an employment assertion to a staff member's ORCID record via the Member API.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A staff page on a faculty website is not an ORCID record because it is not stored under the ORCID iD's resolution endpoint.
- Not an instance
A Scopus author profile is not an ORCID record, though the two are often linked.
Editorial commentary
An ORCID record is the structured graph of claims held against one ORCID iD — the content the iD identifies, as distinct from the identifier itself. The iD is a bare 16-digit number that carries no information on its own; the record is everything asserted about the person behind it: biographical details, and ‘activities’ such as employment, education, funding, works, peer review, and service.
Every claim carries its own source
What makes a record more than a free-text profile is that each individual claim is independently attributed to a source: the iD holder themselves (self-asserted), a trusted organisation acting through the ORCID Member API (a university, publisher, or funder asserting, for example, an employment or funding claim on the researcher’s behalf), or another trusted individual. Two claims on the same record can therefore have entirely different provenance — a self-typed employment entry the researcher added by hand, sitting next to a funding claim a funder’s system pushed automatically — and ORCID’s data model preserves that distinction rather than flattening every claim into one undifferentiated list.
Record structure
The activities section of a record is organised into typed categories rather than one open list: employment and education (see ORCID employment and ORCID education), works (see ORCID work assertion for how an output gets attached), funding, peer review, and invited positions/memberships/service. Each claim’s visibility — public, trusted parties only, or private — is governed independently, per the three-level model described at ORCID record permissions.
Access and formats
The record is editable directly via the ORCID web interface and programmatically via the ORCID API, and is exposed under content negotiation as JSON, XML, or RDF depending on what a requesting client asks for.
Worked example / counter-example
A record where a university’s Member API integration auto-asserts a new employment claim the moment payroll onboards the researcher, alongside works the researcher added themselves via the personal ORCID interface, is a typical mixed-provenance record. A record consisting only of an iD with no activities populated at all is not yet a meaningfully useful record — it exists, but has nothing for the ecosystem (funders, publishers, institutions) to read.
References
- ORCID Inc., ‘ORCID Record Structure’ (developer documentation, info.orcid.org).
- Haak L.L. et al., ‘ORCID: A System to Uniquely Identify Researchers’, Learned Publishing 25(4), 2012.
Also known as
ORCID profile
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="ORCID record"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/orcid-record" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/orcid-record",
"name": "ORCID record",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/orcid-record",
"description": "The structured profile maintained at orcid.org for an individual ORCID iD, containing assertions about the person's names, employments, educations, funding, works, peer reviews, and service activities, each with a visibility setting and a source attribution.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/persistent-identifiers#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/orcid-record",
"alternateName": [
"ORCID profile"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-21T02:08:14",
"dateModified": "2026-09-06T19:58:36",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
