Universities and postdoctoral affairs offices also have challenges of collecting meaningful data about the outcomes of their students and trainees. Early career researchers also face the challenge of not having their work discovered and recognized because of name ambiguity problems: common, changed, or misspelled names. Melanie Sinche, Harvard University From Webinar 4/23/14, https://orcid.org/content/identification-early-career-researchers-how-universities-and-funding-organizations-are-using

1. Challenges and benefits
of using ORCID for early
career researchers and
research organizations
Melanie Sinche
Director, FAS Office of Postdoctoral
Affairs,
Harvard University
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5238-9642
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2. Case Study: Harvard University
• Decentralized campus
• 10 separate schools
• Tracking systems for postdocs vary across schools
 Several different systems used to track postdocs
 Individual departments also maintain their own tracking systems
CHALLENGE: How can we identify our postdocs in an efficient way?

3. • Various funding sources
• Over 1,000 postdocs are not on payroll, due to types of
funders, funder requirements
CHALLENGE: How can we use tracking systems to ensure equity,
regardless of funding source?
Case Study: Harvard University

4. • Postdoc outcomes difficult to track
• NSF: Early Career Doctorates Survey
• Need for exit data on the local level remains
• Graduate student outcomes also difficult to track
• Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED)
• Local exit surveys
CHALLENGE: How can we capture data on outgoing graduate students
and postdocs effectively?
Case Study: Harvard University

5. How can ORCID help
with outcomes tracking?
A persistent identifier benefits
researchers & organizations
• The ORCID identifier stays
with researchers throughout
their career
• Connects them reliably with
their research outputs
• Improves discoverability of
their research
• Improves information
sharing—offering us all
better data in the future
ORCID Public Data
“All data contributed to ORCID by
researchers or claimed by them will be
available in standard formats for free
download (subject to he researchers’
own privacy settings) that is uploaded
once a year and released under a CC0
waiver.”
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