Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
A Person record carrying preferred name, ORCID iD, current OrgUnit, list of past employments, and links to all outputs claimed by the researcher.
- Is an instance
A Person record with a name-change history reflecting marriage, transliteration, or transition.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A row in an HR payroll table is not a Person record in the CRIS sense — it lacks the research-relationship layer.
- Not an instance
A LinkedIn profile is not a Person record in a CRIS.
Editorial commentary
The Person record is the join point for everything a CRIS knows about an individual researcher, RA, or other contributor. It typically carries preferred and historical names (including maiden names, transliterations, and name changes, to support disambiguation of older outputs authored under a different name), identifiers (an ORCID iD is now standard practice, often alongside ISNI and a local HR/staff ID — see Identifier crosswalk for how these are kept in sync), employment and qualification history, and links out to every other entity the person touches: Projects they hold a role on, outputs they authored, and OrgUnits they belong to.
Time-bound relationships, not static attributes
A CRIS typically does not store ‘affiliation’ as a static field on the Person record itself. Instead, when this Person belonged to that OrgUnit, or held which role on which Project, is represented through separate, time-bound linking entities — see Affiliation (CRIS) — so the system can answer ‘who worked here in 2019’ as accurately as ‘who works here now,’ and so a researcher’s full affiliation and role history survives a move between institutions rather than being overwritten.
Feeding the public profile
The Person record is also frequently the source data behind an institution’s public-facing researcher profile page — a Pure Portal profile, an Elements-powered profile, or a VIVO profile — generated directly from the CRIS record rather than hand-authored, in contrast to a traditionally maintained researcher webpage. See PIDs & CRIS: ORCID, DOI, ROR, RAiD for how this fits the wider identifier ecosystem.
References
Also known as
CRIS Person · Researcher record
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="Person record (CRIS)"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/person-record-cris" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/person-record-cris",
"name": "Person record (CRIS)",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/person-record-cris",
"description": "In CRIS terminology, the entity representing an individual person involved in research — researcher, RA, PhD candidate, or other contributor — with metadata including names (preferred and historical), identifiers (ORCID iD, ISNI, local HR ID), employments, qualifications, and links to outputs, projects, and organisational units.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/research-info-systems#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/person-record-cris",
"sameAs": [
"CRIS Person",
"Researcher record"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-21T02:15:10",
"dateModified": "2026-08-22T16:17:05",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
