ORCID provides a globally unique identifier for researchers. These identifiers help disambiguate researchers as they become more widely accepted across the research ecosystem. While UCSF does not automatically issue ORCID identifiers to researchers, we know, anecdotally, that many members of the UCSF community have either manually signed up an ORCID ID, or been issued an identifier by another institution.

Every year, the ORCID team releases a public data file of information about every researcher issued an ORCID identifier. I’ve been digging into the October 2018 dataset to look at explore people from UCSF.

How many UCSF people have an ORCID?

Researchers can include their education and employment history in their ORCID data. I looked at people who are appear to be current UCSF employees, in that they:

• listed employment history
• had at least once employment entry at UCSF (or one of the common spellings thereof, as this was a freetext field)
• and the UCSF employment entry did not not have an end date, suggesting it might be ongoing

I found 762 people who listed what could be current employed at UCSF.

How many UCSF Profiles users have an ORCID ID?

Who are the UCSF people with an ORCID? I tried disambiguating the 762 names using UCSF Profiles and UCSF Directory data. I could disambiguate ~570 of those names with some confidence. ~500 of them were in UCSF Profiles, of whom ~350 were faculty members.

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Image credit: Dall·E