VIDWAN ID and Profile: India’s National Expert Database (INFLIBNET)

VIDWAN is India’s national database of experts and researchers, developed and maintained by the Information and Library Network Centre (INFLIBNET), an autonomous inter-university centre of the University Grants Commission (UGC) under India’s Ministry of Education. It is built with financial support from the National Mission on Education through ICT (NME-ICT). For a research administrator working with Indian institutions, funders, or collaborators, VIDWAN is worth understanding as a distinct piece of national research infrastructure — a government-backed expert registry and identifier system, not a rebranding of ORCID or a generic academic directory.

What VIDWAN is for

Per INFLIBNET’s own description, VIDWAN is “the premier database of profiles of scientists / researchers and other faculty members working at leading academic institutions and other R&D organisations involved in teaching and research in India.” A profile brings together an expert’s institutional affiliation, contact details, research experience, publications, skills, and accomplishments in one record.

VIDWAN serves three overlapping functions in the Indian research system:

• Expert discovery — enabling institutions, funders, and journals to identify potential peer reviewers, grant assessors, and collaborators by subject expertise.
• Government and institutional reporting — VIDWAN explicitly supports the “selection of panels of experts for various committees, taskforce[s], established by the Ministries / Govt. establishments for monitoring and evaluation purposes.” This is a materially different use case from ORCID’s researcher-controlled, funder-agnostic model: VIDWAN sits inside India’s national administrative apparatus for constituting expert panels and committees.
• A national researcher identifier — self-registration issues a VIDWAN Researcher ID, described as a “universal standard access point” for the expert’s record within the platform. This is a persistent identifier tied to the profile record itself, not a credential — see “What a VIDWAN ID is, and what it is not” below for why that distinction matters in practice.

Who maintains it, and where it fits

INFLIBNET is a UGC-affiliated autonomous inter-university centre that also operates several other pieces of India’s research-information infrastructure, including the Shodhganga repository of Indian doctoral theses, the related Shodhgangotri PhD-synopsis repository, the N-LIST resource-access consortium, and (more recently) the access-coordination layer behind One Nation One Subscription (ONOS). VIDWAN sits alongside these as the centre’s dedicated expert/researcher-profile layer — closer in intent to a national researcher registry than to a full Current Research Information System (CRIS), since its core object is the individual expert profile rather than a full institutional graph of projects, outputs, and organizations.

How to register on VIDWAN, step by step

“Vidwan id registration” is the fastest-growing search term in this cluster, so this section walks through what the live registration form at vidwan.inflibnet.ac.in/registration actually asks for, verified directly against the portal.

Who can register

The portal describes eligible registrants as an expert holding a postgraduate or doctoral degree in their subject, typically at Associate Professor / Professor / Senior Scientist level or an equivalent teaching-and-research position, at a recognized academic institution or R&D organisation in India. In practice, faculty, scientists, and researchers at eligible institutions self-register; some institutions also route registration through a designated Nodal Officer, which is why the portal’s login page offers separate sign-in types for Expert, Nodal Officer, and Funding Agency users rather than a single generic account type.

What the registration form asks for

On the live registration form, the fields are:

• Title (Prof, Dr, Mr, Ms, Mrs, Smt, Shri)
• Gender
• Email address — this is the account you will log in with; the form does not technically require an institutional (.ac.in) email domain, any working email is accepted, though using your institutional email makes it easier for your institution and INFLIBNET to verify your affiliation later
• Password (entered twice)
• Department and Designation (selected from dropdown lists)
• Month and year of joining your current institution
• A CAPTCHA check

The portal also offers Google and LinkedIn as alternative sign-up methods instead of filling in the form manually. No document upload is required at this initial registration step.

After you submit the registration form

Submitting the form creates your account and VIDWAN Researcher ID. From there you complete a longer profile/application form covering your full academic identity: qualifications, professional experience, research areas, publications, and other accomplishments — this is the record that actually appears when someone searches VIDWAN, so an account with only the registration-form fields filled in will not be useful for expert-panel discovery until the fuller profile is completed. The portal does not publish a fixed turnaround time for a profile to become fully visible, and where institutional verification or Nodal Officer sign-off applies, timing depends on your own institution’s process — check with your library or research office if your institution routes registrations that way. Registration itself is free to the individual expert; INFLIBNET’s operating costs are covered by NME-ICT/Ministry of Education funding rather than user fees.

What a VIDWAN ID is, and what it is not

Despite the “VIDWAN ID” terminology, there is no separate numeric or alphanumeric ID that acts as a credential. The VIDWAN Researcher ID is the persistent identifier attached to your profile record — part of your profile’s stable URL on the platform — and it identifies you, it does not authenticate you. If you are searching for “your VIDWAN ID,” you are almost always looking for your existing profile record rather than a code; the next section covers how to find it.

Account access is a separate subject with its own step-by-step guide. For the three sign-in types (Expert, Nodal Officer, Funding Agency), password recovery, claiming a profile that someone else created for you, and what to do when an attempt fails, see CASRAI’s VIDWAN login guide.

To update your affiliation after moving institutions, edit the affiliation and designation fields on your existing profile rather than creating a second one — see the duplicate-profile problem below for why that matters.

Finding your VIDWAN ID and searching for other researchers’ profiles

VIDWAN’s core public-facing function is expert discovery, so the platform provides a searchable directory of registered profiles, separate from the login/account area. A profile, once complete, typically displays the expert’s name, institutional affiliation and designation, contact details, qualifications, research areas, and publications — the same fields built out during and after registration. If you’re trying to locate your own VIDWAN profile (for example, to find your Researcher ID for a CV or a funding application), search the directory by your name and institution rather than trying to log in with an ID; the search interface and its exact filters are maintained directly by INFLIBNET on the portal and can change, so check the live site for the current search options rather than relying on a fixed list here.

VIDWAN and India’s research-identifier ecosystem: ORCID, Scopus Author ID, IRINS, ANRF, and NIRF

VIDWAN does not sit in isolation. Indian researchers and research administrators typically deal with it alongside several other identifier and infrastructure layers, and it’s easy to conflate them:

• ORCID iD. ORCID is a global, non-profit, researcher-controlled registry with no national affiliation; VIDWAN is a government-funded, India-specific platform operated by a UGC centre, oriented toward domestic institutional and administrative use (expert-panel selection, national reporting) as much as toward individual researcher discovery. An ORCID record is designed to travel with a researcher across journals, funders, and institutions worldwide, disambiguating authorship globally; a VIDWAN profile is designed to be discoverable and citable within India’s own research-governance processes. INFLIBNET states that VIDWAN aims to integrate with external academic identifiers and sources to help generate biosketches or CVs, but CASRAI has not independently verified the current technical depth of any live ORCID-VIDWAN data exchange (for example, whether VIDWAN performs automated, bidirectional publication sync via the ORCID API in the way many CRIS platforms do). Treat any specific integration claim as something to confirm directly with INFLIBNET or your own institution’s research office before relying on it operationally. In practice, many Indian researchers maintain both: an ORCID iD for international journal submission and funder compliance, and a VIDWAN profile because it is the registry Indian institutions and ministries actually consult for domestic expert-panel and reporting purposes.
• Scopus Author ID. This is a publisher-assigned, algorithmically generated identifier for an author’s Scopus-indexed publication set, not something a researcher registers for directly — see CASRAI’s guide on how to create, find, and fix a Scopus Author ID. It’s a useful cross-reference for verifying the publication list on a VIDWAN profile, but the two IDs are generated and governed completely differently, and neither substitutes for the other.
• IRINS. Institutions using INFLIBNET’s separate Institutional Research Information System (IRINS) product maintain a fuller institutional CRIS — projects, grants, and outputs alongside people — distinct from VIDWAN’s individual expert-profile focus. Where both are in use at an institution, VIDWAN and IRINS commonly draw on overlapping researcher data, but they are separate systems with separate logins; check with your institution’s library or IT team for how, if at all, they’re kept in sync locally.
• ANRF and NIRF. The Anusandhan National Research Foundation (ANRF) — established by the ANRF Act, assented 15 August 2023 and operational from December 2023, absorbing the former Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB) — is India’s apex research-funding and coordination body; see CASRAI’s ANRF overview. The National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) is the Ministry of Education’s annual institutional ranking exercise, which weighs research output and faculty research metrics among its criteria. Neither ANRF nor NIRF is technically the same system as VIDWAN, and CASRAI has not verified any formal, automated data feed between VIDWAN profiles and either ANRF review processes or NIRF submissions. What is well documented is the functional link: VIDWAN is one of the sources institutions and ministries can draw expert profiles from when constituting the review panels and committees that ANRF-linked schemes and other government processes require, and institutions preparing NIRF submissions may use their faculty’s VIDWAN profiles as one convenient source of research-output data already on record — but confirm the specifics of any given scheme or ranking cycle against its own current guidelines rather than assuming a technical integration exists.

Common VIDWAN profile problems and how to fix them

Duplicate profiles

Duplicate profiles typically arise when a researcher re-registers (for example, after forgetting their original login email) instead of recovering the existing account, or when both the researcher and their institution create separate entries. VIDWAN’s registration form validates against duplicate email addresses at signup, which prevents an exact re-registration on the same email, but it does not prevent a second profile under a different email for the same person. If you find you have two profiles, the safer path is to keep the older/more complete one, stop updating the duplicate, and contact your institution’s library or research office (or INFLIBNET directly) to have the duplicate flagged or merged, rather than continuing to maintain both.

Incorrect or missing publication attribution

Because publication details on a VIDWAN profile are entered by the expert (or an administrator on their behalf) rather than pulled automatically from a bibliographic database, attribution errors are usually a data-entry issue rather than a platform bug. Cross-checking your listed publications against your ORCID record or Scopus Author ID is a reasonable way to catch and correct gaps before relying on your VIDWAN profile for a panel nomination or report.

Updating affiliation after moving institutions

Log in with your existing registered email and edit the affiliation, department, and designation fields directly on your profile rather than creating a new one at the new institution — this preserves your existing publication history, research-area tags, and your VIDWAN Researcher ID. If your registered email was tied to your previous institution and you no longer have access to it, follow the account-recovery steps above before making the change.

Profile not appearing in search

A profile that exists but wasn’t appearing in searches is most often a matter of an incomplete record (for example, missing subject/keyword fields that the discovery function relies on) rather than a technical fault. Completing the fuller application-form fields — research areas, qualifications, and publications, not just the initial registration fields — is the first thing to check. If the profile still isn’t surfacing after that, that’s a question for INFLIBNET support or your institution’s Nodal Officer rather than something a researcher can diagnose from outside the platform.

Why this matters for research administrators

If you administer research at an Indian institution, or collaborate with one, VIDWAN is relevant in a few concrete situations:

• Nominating or identifying reviewers/panelists for government-linked evaluation exercises, where VIDWAN is a primary lookup source.
• Verifying an Indian collaborator’s credentials — a populated VIDWAN profile is a commonly-used verification point alongside institutional affiliation and ORCID.
• Advising faculty on identifier hygiene — since VIDWAN and ORCID serve different downstream audiences, guidance to “just use ORCID” is incomplete for researchers who also need domestic visibility for panel/committee consideration.
• Supporting faculty through registration and login issues — since VIDWAN login runs on registered email rather than a portable ID, the most common support requests (forgotten registration email, access lost after changing institutions, duplicate profiles) are predictable enough that a research office can handle most of them with the steps above before escalating to INFLIBNET.

Frequently asked questions

Is VIDWAN mandatory for researchers in India?

There is no single national mandate requiring every Indian researcher to register on VIDWAN, but many universities, institutes, and specific government schemes require or strongly encourage a current profile, since it is the source institutions and ministries draw from for expert-panel nominations. Requirements vary by institution and scheme — check with your own research office.

Does VIDWAN replace ORCID for Indian researchers?

No. They serve different purposes: ORCID is the global, portable identifier expected by international journals and many funders; VIDWAN is India’s domestic expert-registry and identifier system, used primarily for national administrative and reporting purposes. Most active Indian researchers benefit from maintaining both.

Who can register on VIDWAN?

VIDWAN is intended for scientists, researchers, and faculty members working in teaching and research roles at recognized Indian academic institutions and R&D organizations, typically at postgraduate/doctoral level and Associate Professor / Professor / Senior Scientist or equivalent positions. Registration is self-service via the portal’s registration form, or via Google/LinkedIn sign-up.

Do I need an institutional email address to register on VIDWAN?

Not technically — the live registration form accepts any working email address. In practice, using your institutional email is still a good idea, since it makes it easier for your institution and INFLIBNET to confirm your affiliation, and it’s more stable across the account-recovery scenarios covered above than a personal address you might change.

What is my VIDWAN ID, and where do I find it?

Your VIDWAN ID is the identifier attached to your profile record on the portal, visible in your profile’s URL once the profile exists — it is not a credential. Find it by searching the public expert directory for your own name and opening your profile, as described above. Questions about signing in are covered separately in CASRAI’s VIDWAN login guide.

Is there a cost to create a VIDWAN profile?

No. VIDWAN is a publicly funded platform (via the National Mission on Education through ICT, under India’s Ministry of Education) and registration for individual experts is free.

Who operates VIDWAN?

INFLIBNET (Information and Library Network Centre), an autonomous inter-university centre of the University Grants Commission (UGC), develops and maintains VIDWAN.

Related CASRAI resources

• VIDWAN login guide — signing in as Expert, Nodal Officer, or Funding Agency, and fixing failed logins
• ORCID iD — the global persistent identifier for individual researchers
• ORCID record — what an ORCID profile contains and how it’s populated
• Scopus Author ID — the publisher-assigned identifier VIDWAN profiles are often cross-checked against
• How to Create, Find, and Fix a Scopus Author ID
• How to Link Your Scopus Author ID to Your ORCID Record
• ANRF India: Anusandhan National Research Foundation Explained
• ANRF portal login — signing in on anrfonline.in with legacy SERB credentials
• DST (India): Department of Science and Technology — Role, Structure & Schemes
• India’s Technology Transfer Framework: National IPR Policy, ANRF, and the 2025 Patent Rules
• Shodhganga: India’s National Repository of PhD Theses (INFLIBNET)
• Shodhgangotri: INFLIBNET’s PhD Synopsis Repository
• One Nation One Subscription (ONOS): India’s National Journal-Access Scheme
• ROR ID — the equivalent persistent-identifier layer for research organizations
• ROR IDs explained: why research organizations need one and how to get one
• NFDI: Germany’s national research data infrastructure explained — another country’s approach to national research infrastructure, for comparison