Examples
Worked examples
- Is an instance
0000-0002-1825-0097 (Josiah Carberry, ORCID's mascot test record).
- Is an instance
An ORCID iD asserted in a Crossref deposit alongside an author name to disambiguate two authors who share a surname.
Counter-examples
Looks similar, but isn't
- Not an instance
A local institutional staff ID such as 'u123456' is not an ORCID iD because it has no global scope and no check digit.
- Not an instance
An email address is not an ORCID iD; emails change over a career while the ORCID iD is intended to persist.
Editorial commentary
The ORCID iD is the identifier itself: a 16-digit persistent identifier, expressed as four hyphen-separated blocks (e.g. 0000-0002-1825-0097) and resolvable as an HTTPS URI under https://orcid.org/, that uniquely identifies one individual researcher. Its final character is an ISO 7064 MOD 11-2 check digit — which may be the literal ‘X’, representing the value 10 — so a transcription error in any other digit is mathematically detectable. The iD is deliberately opaque: it carries no embedded name, institution, or discipline information, which is precisely what lets it remain stable across name changes, institutional moves, and career-long affiliation churn.
iD vs. record: a distinction worth making explicit
The ORCID iD is only the identifier. What it identifies — the graph of employment, education, work, funding, and peer-review claims attached to it — is the ORCID record, a separate concept with its own governance (who can add a claim, who can see it). Registration is free and self-service at orcid.org; resolving the HTTPS form returns the public profile page in a browser or, under content negotiation, the record in JSON-LD, XML, or RDF.
The ORCID ecosystem
Because ORCID underpins a wide family of related CASRAI entries, this page routes to them rather than restating their content: how a researcher authenticates as the iD holder (ORCID sign-in), how a third-party system reads or writes record data programmatically (ORCID API), the affiliation categories ORCID groups under ‘professional activities’ (ORCID service, plus the specific employment and education types), how a research output gets claimed onto a record (ORCID work assertion), the three-level visibility model governing every individual claim (ORCID record permissions), and how institutions join ORCID collectively through a national or regional grouping (ORCID consortium).
References
- ORCID Inc., ‘Structure of the ORCID Identifier’ (orcid.org support documentation).
- ISO 7064:2003, Information technology — Security techniques — Check character systems.
Also known as
ORCID identifier · ORCID number
Machine-readable encodings
Use in your systems
<role vocab="credit"
vocab-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/"
vocab-term="ORCID iD"
vocab-term-identifier="https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/orcid-id" />{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "DefinedTerm",
"@id": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/orcid-id",
"name": "ORCID iD",
"identifier": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/orcid-id",
"description": "A 16-digit persistent identifier, expressed as four hyphen-separated blocks (e.g. 0000-0002-1825-0097) and resolvable as an HTTPS URI under https://orcid.org/, that uniquely identifies an individual researcher across publications, datasets, grants, employments, and peer-review activity.",
"inDefinedTermSet": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/domain/persistent-identifiers#set",
"url": "https://casrai.org/dictionary/term/orcid-id",
"sameAs": [
"ORCID identifier",
"ORCID number"
],
"license": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
"publisher": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#organization"
},
"author": {
"@id": "https://casrai.org/#editorial-team"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-21T02:08:07",
"dateModified": "2026-08-22T19:51:43",
"inLanguage": "en-GB",
"isAccessibleForFree": true
}
