Over a decade ago, in September 2015, I wrote this blog post:
Why I still think people should be jumping on the ORCID bandwagon
This was written a few months before I left academia to move into science communication. Rediscovering this blog post today made me wonder 'Has ORCID taken off?'
I had a quick look and found this paper from last year which includes in its abstract, this fact:
"We found an overall adoption rate of 72%, with adoptions rates ranging between academic disciplines from a low of 17% in the visual and performing arts to a high of 93% in biological and biomedical sciences"
93% is amazing and I hope those working in biological sciences continue to find it genuinely useful.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-025-05300-7
Just over a decade ago, the ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier) was created to provide a unique digital identifier for researchers around the world. The ORCID has proven essential in identifying individual researchers and their publications, both for bibliometric research analyses and for universities and other organizations tracking the research productivity and impact of their personnel. Yet widespread adoption of the ORCID by individual researchers has proved elusive, with previous studies finding adoption rates ranging from 3% to 42%. Using a national survey of U.S. academic researchers at 31 research universities, we investigate why some researchers adopt an ORCID and some do not. We found an overall adoption rate of 72%, with adoptions rates ranging between academic disciplines from a low of 17% in the visual and performing arts to a high of 93% in biological and biomedical sciences. Many academic journals require an ORCID to submit a manuscript, and this is the main reason why researchers adopt an ORCID. The top three reasons for not having an ORCID are not seeing the benefits, being far enough in the academic career to not need it, and working in an academic discipline where it is not needed.
Having a quick look at my ORCiD page I'm pleased to see that at some point I remembered to update it to add my most recent employment (even though not connected to science anymore, it would let someone see my career path).
I had also added a link to Mastodon at some point but I need to update that to point to this account:
Keith Bradnam 📈