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.
- Is an instance
A visiting-scholar affiliation with its own role type ('visitor') and end date, distinct from the person's primary employment affiliation.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A static department field on a researcher 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
In CRIS (Current Research Information System) terminology, an affiliation is a time-bounded relationship connecting a Person record to an Organization Unit — not an attribute stored on the person, and not an attribute stored on the org unit, but a separate linking fact with its own start date, end date, role (employee, visitor, honorary, student), and often an employment fraction. CERIF, the reference data model most CRIS platforms implement in some form, models this explicitly as a linking entity rather than a foreign-key attribute.
Why the temporal structure matters in practice
Because an affiliation carries its own dates, a CRIS can correctly answer questions a flat ‘current department’ field cannot: who was in this department in 2019, even if they have since moved; and, more importantly for research reporting, which affiliation was in force when a given output was published. An output published in 2018 should be attributed to the affiliation the researcher held in 2018, not to whatever their current affiliation happens to be — getting this wrong misattributes institutional research output in funder and national-assessment reporting.
How ORCID’s employment write-back follows the same pattern
The Member API’s ORCID employment write-back to a researcher’s ORCID record follows an equivalent structure — start date, end date, organisation identifier — for exactly the same reason: an affiliation is inherently something that holds for a period, not a permanent label.
How this differs from its closest CRIS siblings
Affiliation is the relationship, not either endpoint of it. It is not the same entity as Organization unit — the org-side endpoint, the department or institution itself, which exists independently of any specific person’s affiliation to it — and it is not the same entity as Funding entity, a different CERIF linking entity connecting Funder, Project and People. A person can hold a funding-entity link to a grant without any affiliation change, and vice versa.
Frequently asked questions
Is a job title the same as an affiliation?
No — role or title is typically a field within the affiliation record, but the affiliation itself is the dated link between person and org unit; a title alone, without dates, is not a complete affiliation record.
What happens to an affiliation record when someone moves institutions?
The original affiliation gets an end date rather than being deleted, and a new affiliation record is created for the new organisation, preserving the historical, dated relationship for correct output attribution.
References
- euroCRIS, ‘CERIF Linking Entities’.
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Affiliation (CRIS)"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/affiliation-cris" />{
"@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"
},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-21T02:15:30",
"dateModified": "2026-08-22T15:52:35",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
