To register for an ORCID iD, go to orcid.org/register and complete a free six-step form covering name, email, password, employment, visibility setting, and terms agreement, with no institutional or funder approval required. To find an iD you already registered, or search for someone else’s, use ORCID’s public registry rather than creating a duplicate account.
An ORCID iD is only useful once you actually have one, can find your own when you’ve forgotten it, can search the registry for someone else’s, and can connect it to the systems that read from it — funders, publishers, and institutional CRIS platforms. This guide covers those four practical tasks directly. For the definition, format, and history of ORCID iDs themselves, see the ORCID iD dictionary entry.
How to register for an ORCID iD
Registration is free, takes a few minutes, and happens entirely at orcid.org/register. There is no institutional or funder approval step — anyone can register directly.
- Enter your name. A given name is required; a family name is optional, since ORCID’s form is built to accommodate naming conventions that don’t split into “first/last.” You can add alternate names (a maiden name, a name in another script, a preferred publishing name) after registration.
- Enter your email address (entered twice to confirm), which becomes your sign-in credential along with a password. ORCID strongly recommends adding a secondary backup email, since email is also how account recovery works.
- Set a password and, optionally, enable two-factor authentication afterward from account settings. 2FA is not required to register, but ORCID recommends it and warns that losing both your 2FA device and your saved recovery codes means support has to manually restore access — save the recovery codes somewhere durable the moment you enable it.
- Add current employment if you want to — this step can be skipped entirely and added later, including if your organization doesn’t appear in the lookup.
- Choose a default visibility setting for new information added to your record: Everyone (public), Trusted parties (only organizations you’ve explicitly granted access), or Only me (private). This is a default, not a permanent lock — you can set visibility per-item later, and ORCID’s own guidance recommends Everyone or Trusted parties specifically because a fully private record can’t be found or auto-updated by the funder/publisher systems described below.
- Agree to ORCID’s terms (privacy policy, terms of use, and that your data is processed in the United States), complete the CAPTCHA, and submit.
Source: ORCID’s own registration help article.
A note on duplicate registration
Register once. A researcher who registers a second time (a common mistake when someone forgets they already have an iD and can’t immediately find it — see the next section) ends up with two disconnected records, which defeats the entire point of a persistent identifier: disambiguating one person’s work across their career. If you suspect you or a collaborator already has an iD, search for it first using the method below before registering a new one.
How to find your own ORCID iD (if you’ve forgotten it)
If you’re already registered but can’t remember your iD:
- Check your inbox for ORCID’s original confirmation email, or any email from a system (a publisher, a funder) that references your ORCID iD.
- Go to orcid.org/signin and use “forgot your ORCID iD or password” — ORCID will look it up by the email address on file and send a reset link.
- If your institution or a consortium (see below) manages ORCID iDs on your behalf, your library or research office can often look it up for you without needing your login credentials, since institutional access is governed separately from your personal sign-in.
How to search the ORCID registry for someone else’s iD
The public registry at orcid.org is free to search and does not require an account.
Basic search
Use the search bar on the ORCID homepage and enter a name. For common names, add an affiliation or institution to the query — this is usually enough to narrow a broad name match to the right person. Results show the iD along with whatever the record holder has chosen to make public (current employment, works, other identifiers).
Advanced search
Selecting the settings/gear icon next to the search bar opens an advanced search form, which lets you search separately by ORCID iD, given name, family name, or keyword (useful for finding researchers active in a specific field rather than a named individual).
Search by a known work instead of a name
If a name search returns too many ambiguous matches, search instead by a DOI of a paper you know the person authored, or search the paper’s title directly — publishers increasingly attach ORCID iDs to author metadata at the DOI-registration stage (see how to find and resolve a DOI), so the iD is often retrievable from the work itself even when the person’s name is too common to search directly.
Why “search by email” usually doesn’t work
ORCID’s search API technically supports querying by email, but it’s an unreliable way to find someone in practice: email visibility on ORCID records defaults to Only me, and the large majority of registered users never change that default. A record with a private email address simply won’t surface in an email-based search, regardless of whether the email is correct. Name plus institution, or name plus a known DOI, are more reliable starting points.
Finding everyone at your institution
Institutions with an ORCID membership (individually or through a national consortium — see ORCID consortium) can query the ORCID Member API for all iDs that have granted that institution record permissions, which is how research offices build institution-wide ORCID coverage reports without needing every individual to be found one at a time through the public search.
Connecting your ORCID iD to institutional and funder systems
Registering an iD is the first step; the practical value comes from connecting it to the systems that read from or write to it. ORCID calls this granting access to a trusted organization: a funder, publisher, repository, or institutional system you’ve explicitly authorized (revocable at any time from your account’s “Trusted parties” page) to read your record or write new information to it — an auto-update. Crossref, DataCite, and major publisher and indexing platforms use this to add new DOI-linked works to a researcher’s record automatically once permission is granted, rather than requiring the researcher to add each item by hand.
Connecting to NIH (eRA Commons)
NIH requires an ORCID iD linked to your eRA Commons Personal Profile for specific applicant groups, and the requirement has expanded over time. Individual fellowship and career development award applicants (and NIH trainees) have needed a linked iD since notice NOT-OD-19-109 (FY 2020); as of NIH’s Common Forms rollout for due dates on or after January 25, 2026, every senior/key person listed on an application must have an ORCID iD linked to their eRA Commons profile, entered in the persistent-identifier field of the new biosketch/current-and-pending-support forms — eRA Commons will reject a submission where a listed senior/key person’s iD isn’t linked. The link is made from within eRA Commons: open your Personal Profile, select “Create or Connect Your ORCID iD,” sign in to (or register) your ORCID account, and authorize NIH’s access. Each ORCID iD can only be linked to one Commons account.
Connecting to NSF
NSF’s Proposal & Award Policies & Procedures Guide (PAPPG) currently encourages senior personnel to enter an ORCID iD in their SciENcv-generated biographical sketch rather than mandating it outright, unlike NIH’s current position. NSF’s Research.gov account also has an optional field for storing an ORCID iD. Broader federal movement toward a mandatory persistent-identifier requirement across agencies (per the White House OSTP’s 2022 public-access memo) has been reported but is not yet formally in force for NSF at the PAPPG level as of this writing — check the current PAPPG and your NSF program solicitation directly before assuming a specific agency’s requirement, since agency-by-agency implementation on this point has moved at different speeds.
Connecting to your institution
Universities and research institutions that are ORCID members (directly, or through a national consortium) can integrate ORCID sign-in and record access into their own systems — commonly the institutional repository, the research information system (CRIS), or HR/identity systems — so that affiliation, employment, and education data can flow between the institutional system and the researcher’s ORCID record without duplicate manual entry. This is the same underlying mechanism (an OAuth-based grant of record permissions to a trusted organization) as the funder connections above, just initiated from the institutional side. It’s a practical instance of the broader identifier crosswalk problem CASRAI’s persistent identifiers & research information systems cluster covers more generally — ORCID rarely operates as an isolated identifier in practice; its value comes from exactly these system-to-system connections.
Featured works and profile visibility
Once your record has at least one public work, ORCID lets you mark up to five of your public works as “Featured” — they display at the top of your works list with a star, ahead of everything else, which is useful for a career-highlights view when a record has accumulated many entries. A work is automatically dropped from the Featured list if its visibility is later changed away from public. Featuring is separate from visibility itself: only works already set to Everyone can be featured at all, since a private or trusted-parties-only work isn’t visible to whoever’s looking at your public profile in the first place.
Frequently asked questions
Is registering for an ORCID iD free?
Yes, for individual researchers. Registration, the public registry search, and maintaining your own record are all free. ORCID’s revenue comes from membership fees paid by institutions, funders, and publishers that integrate with the API, not from individual researchers.
Can I search ORCID by email address?
Technically yes via the API, but in practice it rarely works, because most ORCID users leave their email visibility set to the private default. Search by name plus institution, or by a known DOI, instead.
What happens if I accidentally register more than one ORCID iD?
You’ll end up with two disconnected records, which undermines the identifier’s purpose. Contact ORCID support to have the duplicate merged or deactivated rather than trying to use both going forward.
Is linking my ORCID iD to eRA Commons or Research.gov mandatory?
For NIH, yes for the applicant categories described above, as of the dates given. For NSF, current guidance encourages but does not yet formally mandate it at the PAPPG level — confirm against your specific program’s current solicitation, since agency requirements in this space have been changing quickly.
Can my institution find ORCID iDs for everyone on staff without searching one by one?
Only for researchers who have explicitly granted that institution record-access permissions as a trusted organization — ORCID’s privacy model means an institution cannot enumerate iDs it hasn’t been granted access to, even for its own staff, through the public search alone.
