On August 16, 2022, the ORCID US Community consortium welcomed representatives from Northwestern University to speak on how ORCID adoption has changed and adapted at their university from 2017 to 2022. Karen Gutzman, Head of Research Assessment and Communications at Northwestern Galter Health Sciences Library and Jamie Carlstone, Authority Metadata Librarian at Northwestern University Library, provided a case study on how their team conducted an ORCID Data Review to collect and identify key ORCID metrics. This review would assist in forming a recommendation on ORCID next steps to stakeholders at their university. 

This blog post will introduce readers to Northwestern University’s ORCID Data Review (a review of ORCID adoption on Northwestern’s campus), share the steps of the review process, and share how it will be implemented for the benefit of Northwestern University’s stakeholders.

For readers interested in this presentation, case study and webinar, the Community Call was recorded and made available to ORCID US Community members. For more information, contact orcidus@lyrasis.org.   

2017-2022, Northwestern University’s ORCID Implementation

Northwestern University joined ORCID as a part of the Big 10 Academic Alliance in early 2017. An ORCID Implementation team was formed within Northwestern University at this time; this team successfully expanded the reach of ORCID at the university by:

  • creating a technical plan for storing ORCID iDs and access tokens in their local LDAP system, an identity management repository for electronic identifiers and person-based attributes within Northwestern,
  • provisioning a web address to create the Northwestern ORCID enrollment app, and
  • developing a communication plan for sharing information about ORCID with faculty, researchers, graduate students, postdoctoral students, etc. 

In December 2017, the Vice President of Research at Northwestern sent a letter to faculty strongly encouraging them to register and connect their ORCID iDs to the Northwestern NetID using the new Northwestern ORCID enrollment app.  

From 2019-2022, libraries serving Northwestern created online subject guides and promoted ORCID workshops in classrooms and during consultations. The ORCID Implementation team created and maintained an ORCID support email to help answer questions and assist in ORCID adoption across Northwestern’s campus. 

In 2022, the ORCID Implementation team rebranded, becoming the ORCID Adoption and Utilization team. During this period, Carlstone, as well as other members, joined the team. 

With the rebranding, the newly formed team considered new ways to increase ORCID adoption at Northwestern. The team determined that providing reliable information about the benefits of ORCID would encourage ORCID adoption within Northwestern’s campus. The team also concluded that enriching ORCID records by using integrated systems would positively impact researchers at Northwestern by improving author name-disambiguation in publication sources used in university rankings, and make it easier for researchers to create SciENcv biosketches for federal funding agencies like NIH and NSF, track their career trajectory, and evaluate their research.  

“Understanding these impacts has made it easier to specifically explain the benefits of ORCID to our researchers and to the leadership at our institution, as well as work through our plans to promote market adoption at the institution” (Carlstone, 31:06). 

These considerations led to the decision to create a recommendation to stakeholders at Northwestern University that would outline the benefits of the ORCID membership.

Northwestern University’s ORCID Data Review

In 2022, along with bringing together a mostly new team, Northwestern decided to undergo an ORCID Data Review. This ORCID Data Review would be a review of current adoption of ORCID at Northwestern University, and would provide leadership at Northwestern with a better understanding of the current state of ORCID data associated with the university. As a part of the review, the recommendations outlined would also provide descriptions of ORCID API integration capabilities in Northwestern software systems, examine pathways for authenticating ORCID iDs, and share how to enrich data in Northwestern researchers’ ORCID profiles. 

Northwestern’s ORCID Adoption and Utilization team wanted to evaluate the rate of ORCID adoption at the university since 2017, when Northwestern became an ORCID member. To do so, the team compiled a dataset from two key systems: 

  • Northwestern Elements (a Faculty Information Management System from Symplectic Elements that tracks publications and unique author identifiers), which can identify ORCID iDs based on metadata from publications that matched with researchers at Northwestern; researchers can then choose to claim and authenticate their ORCID iD.   
  • Northwestern ORCID Enrollment app, which allows users to authenticate and connect their ORCID iD with their Northwestern NetID.  

To properly evaluate the data, the team focused on specific position types that would have been the most likely to publish a scholarly paper, and narrowed that scope with a set of criteria. The criteria was to only include current employees with position types that: had greater than 30 members, and had greater than an average of 30 journal articles, books or book chapters, per member, published from 2017 to the present (2022, at the time of the study). Based on this criteria, 9 position types were chosen from current employees at associated schools within Northwestern University.

These employees were then counted to create the initial dataset. From that data, the team was able to determine how many of these employees used Northwestern Elements or the Northwestern Enrollment app to claim and then authenticate their ORCID iDs. The team separated that data into several categories: employees who authenticated in both platforms, or only in one (and of the two platforms, which one did they use), employees who claimed an ORCID iD but did not authenticate in either system, how many employees had been matched with an ORCID iD but had not claimed it, and how many employees did not have an ORCID iD.

Figure 1: Dataset of compiled count of current employees at each school, separated by ORCID iD authentications and claims in either the Northwestern ORCID enrollment app, Symplectic Elements, or neither platform.

Figure 1: Dataset of compiled count of current employees at each school, separated by ORCID iD authentications and claims in either the Northwestern ORCID enrollment app, Symplectic Elements, or neither platform.

The dataset revealed to the team that information varied across the two platforms. Gutzman shared that 406 employees claimed their ORCID iDs in Elements, but only 139 of those employees had also authenticated them in the Northwestern ORCID enrollment app. There was also a group of employees who had ORCID iDs but had not claimed them. Gutzman shared that the next step would be to contact these employees. The data also showed that the majority of employees did not have ORCID iDs. 

The team did an additional test using ORCID.org to verify how many employees did not have ORCID iDs. They searched, by name, for these faculty and discovered that only a small percentage had ORCID iDs that were not picked up by Elements or the Northwestern ORCID enrollment app. With all the data verified and compiled, the dataset revealed that ORCID adoption at Northwestern University could be improved. 

“I think the numbers are a little smaller than what all of us expected, and that just means we have a lot more work to do, especially in terms of outreach” (Karen Gutzman, 37:24).

The team moved on to the second part of their ORCID Data Review: creating a list of Northwestern systems which could potentially integrate with ORCID. From February to April 2022, the team worked with Web of Science, Scopus, Pure and Symplectic Elements to gain a better understanding of:

  • the user’s experience in connecting ORCID with their system
  • what data from that system would look like
  • how data in their system is sent to or received from ORCID
  • why ORCID is important to their system 

After meeting with the vendors, the team made plans to formalize recommendations as a committee, including:  

  • writing a summary of vendor and product owner meetings, including highlights from various tools
  • creating a prioritized list of trusted organizations that support:
    • writing/reading scholarly works to/from ORCID records
    • writing employment to ORCID records

Current State and Future Plans

When Gutzman and Carlstone shared this case study in 2022 with the ORCID US Community, the ORCID Data Review was still underway. 

As of May 2024, Gutzman and Carlstone shared that an ORCID Data Review report was created and can be run by Northwestern’s ORCID Adoption and Utilization team at any time to analyze and track ORCID adoption amongst Northwestern’s community and discern which members of the community have an ORCID iD but have not yet linked it with their Northwestern identifier. Once the report is run, next steps include emailing these community members to emphasize the value of linking their ORCID iD to their Northwestern NetID. By developing this ORCID Data Review report, the team can make more targeted outreach efforts and increase ORCID adoption on campus.

Since the presentation, the team also worked with the Faculty Affairs Office and now,  ORCID is included in faculty onboarding and offboarding documentation. 

Resources

For researchers and organizations wishing to learn more about ways to encourage stakeholder support, and to develop ORCID outreach, here are some helpful resources: