=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-2816/paper10
|storemode=property
|title=Reflections on the Misuses of ORCID iDs
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2816/paper10.pdf
|volume=Vol-2816
|authors=Miriam Baglioni,Andrea Mannocci,Paolo Manghi,Claudio Atzori,Alessia Bardi,Sandro La Bruzzo
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ircdl/BaglioniMMABB21
}}
==Reflections on the Misuses of ORCID iDs==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2816/paper10.pdf
Reflections on the Misuses of ORCID iDs
Miriam Baglioni[0000−0002−2273−9004] , Andrea Mannocci[0000−0002−5193−7851] ,
Paolo Manghi[0000−0001−7291−3210] ,
[0000−0001−9613−6639]
Claudio Atzori , Alessia Bardi[0000−0002−1112−1292] , and
Sandro La Bruzzo[0000−0003−2855−1245]
ISTI-CNR, Pisa, Italy
{name.surname}@isti.cnr.it
Abstract. Since 2012, the “Open Researcher and Contributor Identi-
fication Initiative” (ORCID) has been successfully running a worldwide
registry, with the aim of unequivocally pinpoint researchers and the body
of knowledge they contributed to. In practice, ORCID clients, e.g., pub-
lishers, repositories, and CRIS systems, make sure their metadata can
refer to iDs in the ORCID registry to associate authors and their work
unambiguously. However, the ORCID infrastructure still suffers from sev-
eral “service misuses”, which put at risk its very mission and should be
therefore identified and tackled. In this paper, we classify and qualita-
tively document such misuses, occurring from both users (researchers
and organisations) of the ORCID registry and the ORCID clients. We
conclude providing an outlook and a few recommendations aiming at
improving the exploitation of the ORCID infrastructure.
Keywords: ORCID · Scholarly Communication · Open Science · Academia
1 Introduction
A precise and reliable identification of researchers and the pool of works they
contributed to would greatly benefit scholarly communication practices and fa-
cilitate the understanding of science [4]. Several studies showed what can be
achieved by pursuing researchers’ productivity and affiliations: from understand-
ing career trajectories and citation dynamics to analysing collaboration networks
and migration pathways in academia [14, 15, 2].
Since 2012, ORCID [3], the “Open Researcher and Contributor Identification
Initiative”, has been running a worldwide registry1 , which mints alphanumeric
iDs on behalf of registrant researchers, and maintains a core set of relevant in-
formation such as name, surname, affiliations, works, projects and so on in their
so-called “ORCID profiles”. ORCID’s intended architecture figures the ORCID
Copyright c 2021 for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative Com-
mons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). This volume is published
and copyrighted by its editors. IRCDL 2021, February 18-19, 2021, Padua, Italy.
1
ORCID, https://orcid.org
Fig. 1: Number of ORCID profiles per year.
registry on one side and ORCID clients on the other side. Clients include publish-
ers, thematic and institutional repositories, data archives, such as CRIS systems
and catalogues, hence services supporting the deposition of metadata and/or
files relative to research outputs with referrals to authors’ ORCID iDs.
Needless to say, ORCID popularity among organisations/researchers and
clients has significantly increased over the years. Despite being still far from
being adopted by the whole academic/research community, ORCID iDs are in-
creasingly referenced upon deposition and metadata registration of new research
products.
Unfortunately, the ORCID overlay suffers from a number of misuses which
are today hindering its full potential. Some of these are strictly related to the
misuse of the ORCID registry, while others can be identified in the misuse of
ORCID referrals on the client-side. A clear example of the first class of misuse is
given by the up-to-dateness of ORCID iDs. According to the official statistics2 ,
the whole dataset totals 10,324,141 registered, “live” (sic) profiles. However,
many ORCID profiles - 7,593,481 (i.e., 73.5%) - exhibit no information about
research outputs. Figure 1 reports the number of profiles registered every year
(in blue) and the number of ORCID profiles with a nonempty work section (in
red), as of October 2020. Moreover, a suspiciously increasing number of ORCID
iDs seems not to have anything to share with academia and research in the
first place, as the main purpose of such profiles appears to be related to URLs
spamming and inducing visitors into click-baiting.
Examples of the second class of misuses occur instead whenever legitimate
ORCID registrants and metadata curators, unwillingly or not, sometimes hap-
pen to make mistakes when depositing metadata of relevant research products
2
ORCID official statistics, https://orcid.org/statistics
while linking them to the related ORCID iDs. Indeed, encountering profiles with
mistakenly attributed works is not as infrequent as one might reckon.
It is therefore of pivotal importance to assess the presence of such inconsis-
tencies as they can potentially be detrimental, undermine ORCID credibility in
the eyes of the academic community, and ultimately hamper ORCID benefits
and adoption at large.
In this paper, we qualitatively report on a selection of experienced issues
that we drew from our direct experience while distilling the OpenAIRE Re-
search Graph [8]. The Graph aggregates and deduplicates metadata from both
ORCID registry and ORCID clients, links between research products metadata
and ORCID iDs, thereby offering an overall map of the ORCID infrastructure
as defined above. We report on and identify classes of ORCID misuses on the
ORCID registry side and the ORCID clients side, with the intention of providing
feedback and recommendations on how the related downfalls can be mitigated.
2 A report on ORCID misuses
The OpenAIRE project3 aggregates metadata from over 12,000 sources, be they
institutional/thematic Open Access repositories, publishers, registries and other
aggregators, and builds the OpenAIRE Research Graph, redistributing it free of
charge via periodic dumps on Zenodo [8]. An important component converging
into the OpenAIRE Research Graph is DOIboost [7, 6]: a precomputed dataset
containing Crossref4 [5], Microsoft Academic Graph [11, 13, 12], ORCID and Un-
paywall5 [1]. Additionally, OpenAIRE features an algorithm for research outputs
deduplication [9] so to reconcile different metadata descriptions of the same re-
search output coming from different repositories.
Given the complexity and extreme heterogeneity of the aggregated informa-
tion, OpenAIRE constitutes fertile ground for the identification of anomalies
and misuse of ORCID. Presently, we target the following classes of misuses all
emerged while tackling the consistency and quality of the information released in
the OpenAIRE Research Graph. In the following, they are organised in two sep-
arated sections, one for ORCID misuse as a service and one for ORCID misuse
at client-side. For each of them, we provide a generic description and report an
example by linking to external services publicly accessible for open assessment.
2.1 ORCID registry misuse
Fake ORCID profiles. A fake ORCID profile is an ORCID profile whose reg-
istrant has nothing to share with academia and research, and whose existence
on ORCID has the sole purpose of spamming links or inducing users into click-
baiting. Please have a look at the ORCID search for “bitcoin” (https://orcid.org/
orcid-search/search?searchQuery=bitcoin) or the following ORCID profile:
3
OpenAIRE project, https://www.openaire.eu
4
Crossref, https://www.crossref.org
5
Unpaywall, https://unpaywall.org
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6997-9470. The profile here linked shows no worthy
academic-related information whatsoever while offering a quite comprehensive
collection of spam links to external websites, platforms, and services (e.g., Face-
book, VK, Twitter, Youtube).
Poor quality ORCID profiles. While ORCID users have all the interest in
keeping their profiles as informative and updated as possible, many of them
still exhibit an unsatisfactory grade of information completeness despite being
correctly referred from research outputs metadata. In fact, ORCID requires regis-
trants to provide only their name and a valid email address; a family name is op-
tional (see the ORCID search https://orcid.org/orcid-search/search?searchQuery
=andrea), nor the current affiliation, thus yielding a significant amount of am-
biguity. In 2016, ORCID was described as a mean to solve such uncertainty [10];
four years down the line, we can touch with our hands that ambiguity is an issue
yet far to settle.
Overly-identified authors. Despite being against the whole philosophy of OR-
CID (i.e., unequivocally identify an individual in academia), some authors may,
either intentionally or not, have registered to ORCID multiple times. Therefore,
it might be the case that a publication gets deposited in two different archives
using different ORCID iDs of a given author each time.
While finding duplicates in ORCID is, in general, as complex as finding au-
thor duplicates in research literature (i.e., none or limited ground truth), we can
leverage the results yielded by deduplication algorithms [9] while producing the
OpenAIRE Research Graph so to spot authors with multiple profiles as they
use them in ORCID referrals. In fact, as soon as the OpenAIRE deduplication
merges different ORCID referrals from the same research output, the various
ORCID iDs used collide, and the author presents them all in the paper “rec-
onciled” metadata. In this way, it is possible to detect these cases by checking
research output metadata against ORCID profiles anagraphic information (e.g.,
checking name/surname correspondence). Indeed, this would be a lower bound
estimation of the real number of duplicate ORCID profiles, as there are du-
plicates which we cannot spot out in this way. As an example, we report two
individuals with two ORCID profiles: (https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0166-1973,
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2197-7270) and (https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4807-
3623, https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7820-9889). Via manual inspection, we veri-
fied that they are not a case of homonymy.
Stale ORCID profiles. Besides referring its own ORCID iD when registering
metadata of a publication, an author is, in general, advised to maintain up-to-
date its own profile on the ORCID website as well. However, this practice, often
time-consuming, is not encouraged nor enforced in any way.
Indeed, some authors appear to mint their own ORCID iD with the intention
of using it in the future at deposition time, whilst updating the information in
their profiles as little and sporadically as possible. Most of the users prefer to take
advantage of Crossref and publishers so to automatically update ORCID profiles
on their behalf. As an example, the ORCID profile of the first author of the paper
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S037842661830284X
shows no curated work section (https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5001-2964).
2.2 ORCID clients misuse
ORCID clients offer users capabilities for (i) ingesting metadata (and/or files)
where authors are associated to their ORCID iDs and (ii) adding ORCID iDs
to authors of a metadata record. Such actions can be wizard-supported when
clients implement direct connections with ORCID registry’s APIs (see ORCID
Search & Link Wizard6 ). Accordingly, users can unambiguously link their works
to their profile while correctly referring the metadata record at hand with their
own ORCID iD. Unfortunately, most ORCID clients only support a manual
ingestion approach, which inevitably leads to a large number of mistakes. In
the following we have identified two main classes: non-existent ORCID iDs, and
wrongly-attributed ORCID iDs.
Non-existent ORCID iDs. As a matter of fact, manual ingestion is subject to
human errors, whose common cases are typos and misinterpretation. The former
is enough to lead to a (sometimes) well-formed, yet non-existent, ORCID iDs;
for example, the author Jostein Askim in https://dataverse.no/dataset.xhtml?
persistentId=doi:10.18710/E3W52Q (see the Metadata section) provides an OR-
CID iD where the last character is missing. Similarly, the article https://doi.org/
10.31732/2663-2209-2019-53-159-168 reports a well-formed ORCID iD (0000-
0001-2345-6754), which however does not resolve. Manifestations of the misin-
terpretation instead are, for example, emails or other author identifiers provided
in place of ORCID iDs.
Wrongly-attributed ORCID iDs. A wrong attribution happens whenever an
author of a given research output is attributed with a different ORCID iD. This
misuse reflects the mistake happening during manual data entry/registration,
when the registrant, for unknown reasons, mistypes or provides an irrelevant OR-
CID iD for one or more authors. As an example, the paper https://pubs.acs.org/
doi/10.1021/acs.analchem.6b04010 shows two examples of wrong attribution:
Zhaoyang Wu has the ORCID iD of a coauthor, and Ruqin Yu is attributed the
ORCID https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7412-8360 of another researcher, not in the
original author list. The first example identifies a subclass of wrongly attributed
ORCID iDs, here referred as shuffled. Shuffled ORCID iDs occur whenever the
authors of a given research output are attributed in the metadata the ORCID iDs
of other coauthors. Shuffled ORCID iDs are not necessarily mutually exchanged
6
ORCID Search & Link Wizard, https://support.orcid.org/hc/en-
us/articles/360006973653-Add-works-by-direct-import-from-other-systems
in couples, and the shuffle can involve any number of authors participating in a
publication (i.e., even one).
3 Discussion
Despite its adoption is far from being comprehensive, ORCID has become, with-
out doubt, a central service in scholarly communication, and we are deemed to
see its adoption increasing across all disciplines of science and research in the
years to come. However, in its current status, ORCID presents several anomalies
and misuses that, on top of being detrimental to scholarly communication prac-
tices, can undermine the service credibility and potentially hamper its adoption
at large.
In the previous section, we have qualitatively reported on and documented
a collection of issues in the usage of ORCID iDs to stress the need for future
analysis so to exploit at best the benefits of the ORCID overlay. We intend to
quantitatively extend the present study, so to provide a detailed outlook on the
current incidence and impact of the aforementioned classes of misuse in ORCID.
In this section, we elaborate on possible actions which could be undertaken
in order to address such issues, making a distinction between ORCID registry
misuses and ORCID clients misuses.
3.1 Mitigation of ORCID registry misuses
Four classes of misuses have been identified: fake ORCID profiles, poor-quality
profiles, overly-identified users, and profile up-to-dateness.
In order to solve, or at least mitigate, the anomalies mentioned above, a com-
bined set of actions could be taken, which mainly suggest the ORCID registry to
be more “restrictive” and “rigorous” when approaching its users, i.e. researchers
and organisations.
First of all, individual institutions and research organisations could, for ex-
ample, take over control of the registration process to ORCID, as well as the
dissemination of ORCID “philosophy” and best practices. The recent inclusion
of institutional Identity Providers (IDPs) in ORCID login is undoubtedly a step
forward in this direction; however, it does not suffice alone. Indeed, users still can
register to ORCID providing a minimal amount of information, i.e., just a name
and a valid, potentially non-institutional, email, or even register via Google and
Facebook single sign-on. ORCID registrants could forget how they created their
account in the first place and register afresh using one of the several other meth-
ods provided, quickly ending up in duplicates and fragmentation of information.
Surely, enforcing the access to ORCID only via institutional IDPs would pose
issues upon researchers relocation to another institution, and the consequent
change of IDP, which certainly has to be handled accordingly. Nonetheless, we
believe that this would dramatically improve the accuracy of the information
contained in ORCID, and put a stop to the proliferation of fake profiles. Fur-
thermore, an extensive analysis of the email domains of the existing user base
would enable ORCID to identify non-institutional ones and notify the authors for
an action. At that point, non-compliant ORCID users could be flagged and dep-
recated (but never fully deleted, as they are PIDs7 ) if no action is taken within
a given cool-down period. Indeed, a minority of rather uncommon independent
researchers not affiliated to research institutions does exist. Such cases need to
be handled with special care. One possible solution to this problem could consist
in contacting coauthors or colleagues present on ORCID for an “endorsement”.
To improve the quality and completeness of profiles, ORCID could ask regis-
tered users to simply provide more information, such as family name, alternate
name forms and affiliations. Likewise, reserving other alphabets and charsets
(e.g., Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Chinese and Japanese ideograms) only in the field
reserved for other form names and using the main ones for transliteration into
Roman alphabet would improve the clarity of the anagraphic information.
To disambiguate overly-identified users, ORCID could proactively identify
potential duplicates thanks to AI/ML-driven techniques and/or by engaging
the users directly involved. More generally, ORCID should initiate a quality
program, similar to the one of Scopus, in order to clean up its record and ensure
its reliability at a global level.
3.2 Mitigation of ORCID clients misuse
Manual (non-validated) ingestion of metadata at the ORCID client-side can
greatly disrupt the benefits of the ORCID infrastructure by polluting the schol-
arly communication record. Potential causes are: non-existent ORCID iDs, and
wrongly-attributed iDs. In order to mitigate these issues, ORCID clients should
be equipped with tools that allow users, during metadata ingestion, to automati-
cally recover ORCID iDs directly from the ORCID registry, systematically avoid-
ing manual insertion. Such capabilities would exclude the non-existent ORCID
iDs issue and certainly mitigate the wrongly-attributed issue as a whole (cases of
homonymy still could be troubling) while completely avoiding the shuffle subset.
Acknowledgements
This work was co-funded by the EU H2020 project OpenAIRE-Advance (Grant
agreement ID: 777541).
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