IdRef: France's Researcher Identifier (ABES)

IdRef (“Identifiants et referentiels pour l’Enseignement superieur et la Recherche”) is the national authority-identifier system for French higher education and research, operated by ABES (Agence bibliographique de l’enseignement superieur — the Bibliographic Agency for Higher Education). It assigns and maintains stable identifiers for persons, organizations, and other entities — not by asking researchers to self-register, but by consolidating authority records already produced across France’s academic library and documentation networks. For a research administrator or librarian working with French institutions, IdRef is the identifier layer that sits underneath cataloging, thesis deposit, and increasingly, semantic-web-linked data infrastructure.

What IdRef actually is

IdRef is best understood as an authority-control hub, not a researcher self-service profile system like ORCID. It publishes authority records — canonical, disambiguated entries for a name, organization, or concept — that are produced by member institutions of three French documentary networks:

Sudoc — the collective catalog of French higher-education and research libraries, the main bibliographic backbone behind IdRef’s person and organization records.
Calames — the network for archives and manuscripts held by French research libraries.
STAR — the national system for depositing and reporting French doctoral theses.

Because French doctoral regulations require mandatory reporting of both the thesis author and the supervisor at deposit, every doctoral thesis processed through STAR effectively creates or confirms an IdRef authority record for the people involved. This is a structurally different acquisition path from ORCID, which depends on individual sign-up: IdRef’s researcher coverage grows automatically as a byproduct of the French doctoral pipeline, giving it broad, largely passive coverage of active and past researchers affiliated with French institutions, alongside deliberate registrations and library-side curation.

Who manages it, and how it’s accessed

ABES operates IdRef as part of its broader remit managing shared bibliographic infrastructure for French higher education (it also runs Sudoc itself). IdRef data is openly available through several channels aimed at different users:

A public search interface at idref.fr for manual lookup of person, organization, and subject authority records.
An API and OAI-PMH harvesting endpoint for systems that need to pull records programmatically — the mechanism repositories and CRIS systems typically use to resolve or display IdRef identifiers.
data.idref.fr, a linked-data triple store exposing IdRef’s authority data as RDF for the semantic web, published under France’s Etalab open license.

This linked-data layer is what lets IdRef function as more than a French-specific catalog identifier: because records are published as structured, dereferenceable RDF with links out to other authority files, IdRef can participate in the same web-of-identifiers model that ORCID, ISNI, VIAF, and Wikidata all use.

How IdRef interoperates with ORCID, ISNI, VIAF, and Wikidata

IdRef does not compete with these international identifiers so much as sit alongside them as the French national authority layer, with alignments maintained in both directions:

VIAF (Virtual International Authority File) — ABES exposes its authority data into VIAF, where IdRef person and organization records are reconciled (“clustered”) against equivalent records from other national libraries and library consortia worldwide. This is the same mechanism through which most national authority files become mutually discoverable.
ISNI (International Standard Name Identifier) — IdRef identifiers are aligned with ISNI, the ISO 27729 identifier used broadly across publishing, rights management, and library systems to distinguish contributors. (See CASRAI’s ISNI Explained guide for how ISNI itself relates to ORCID.)
ORCID — IdRef is explicitly framed by ABES as a national “pivot” identifier for higher-education and research administration needs, complementary to ORCID’s role as the international, researcher-controlled standard. Since 2019, ABES has co-piloted the ORCID France consortium, coordinating ORCID adoption and integration across French institutions rather than having IdRef attempt to replace ORCID’s function. Available documentation does not describe IdRef as automatically creating or writing to ORCID records — the two systems are aligned and cross-referenced, not merged, and readers should not assume record-level auto-provisioning between them without checking current ABES documentation for their specific integration.
Wikidata — IdRef entity alignments extend to Wikidata as part of the same broader linked-data ecosystem, allowing an IdRef record and its corresponding Wikidata item to be cross-referenced.

ABES has also extended IdRef alignments beyond its own catalog data to other French documentary and repository platforms — including HAL (the national open-access repository operated by CCSD), BnF (Bibliotheque nationale de France), Cairn, OpenEdition, and Erudit — so that bibliographic references across these sources can be queried and cross-linked through a shared identifier layer. CCSD, HAL’s operator, runs periodic enrichment and alignment campaigns together with ABES spanning IdRef, ISNI, ORCID, and VIAF, which is part of why an IdRef identifier and a researcher’s HAL profile are frequently linked in practice even though they are governed by separate organizations.

IdRef vs. IdHAL: don’t confuse the two

Researchers who publish through HAL will also encounter IdHAL, a HAL-specific researcher identifier that lets an author group their deposits in HAL under one profile and link that profile to external identifiers, including ORCID and IdRef. IdHAL is scoped to HAL itself; IdRef is the broader, ABES-managed national authority identifier that HAL (along with other repositories such as ScanR) consumes and links to. In practice, a French academic researcher may hold an IdRef identifier (via thesis deposit or library cataloging), an ORCID iD (self-registered, international), and an IdHAL identifier (HAL-specific), with alignments connecting the three rather than one superseding the others.

Why this matters for research administration

For institutions and consortia working with French research outputs or personnel data, IdRef is the identifier most likely to already exist for a French-affiliated researcher, even one who has never created an ORCID iD — because of the automatic coverage generated through doctoral thesis reporting. That makes IdRef a useful disambiguation and cross-reference point when reconciling researcher identity across systems: a name-matching problem that might otherwise require manual review can often be resolved by checking whether both candidate records already share an IdRef, VIAF, or ISNI alignment. It also means integrations with French repositories (HAL, thesis platforms, Sudoc-linked library systems) should expect to encounter IdRef identifiers as a first-class part of the metadata, alongside or instead of ORCID.

Frequently asked questions

Is IdRef the same as ORCID?

No. ORCID is a researcher-controlled, international identifier that a person registers for themselves. IdRef is a French national authority identifier, managed by ABES, that is typically generated as a byproduct of library cataloging and doctoral thesis deposit rather than individual self-registration. The two are aligned and cross-referenced, not interchangeable.

Who can get an IdRef identifier?

IdRef records are created and maintained by ABES and the member institutions of the Sudoc, Calames, and STAR networks. Doctoral authors and supervisors are covered automatically through mandatory thesis reporting in STAR; other researchers, organizations, and entities may have records created through library cataloging processes.

Does IdRef replace the need for an ORCID iD?

No. ABES positions IdRef as a national pivot identifier for higher-education and research administration purposes in France, while actively promoting ORCID adoption through its co-piloting of the ORCID France consortium since 2019. Institutions working internationally should still expect researchers to hold and use an ORCID iD.

What is data.idref.fr?

It is IdRef’s linked-data triple store, publishing IdRef’s authority records as RDF under an open (Etalab) license, which is what enables IdRef to be queried and cross-referenced as part of the broader semantic web alongside VIAF, ISNI, and Wikidata.

IdRef: France’s National Researcher Identifier and Its ORCID/ISNI/VIAF Links