ORCID Integration

A Guide for Researchers and Staff

What is ORCID integration?

ORCID gives every researcher a persistent digital identifier (e.g. 0000-0002-1825-0097) that distinguishes them from every other researcher and links them to their works. The Research Portal connects to ORCID in two ways:

Fetch from ORCID — auto-populate your profile from your public ORCID record. No login or setup required.
Connect & Sync — securely link your ORCID account so the portal can pull your Works and (optionally) push citations. Requires a one-time ORCID app registration.

For Researchers

Fetch from ORCID (no account needed)

On the registration form (and your profile), type your ORCID iD into the ORCID ID field and click Fetch. The portal reads your public ORCID record and fills in your first name, last name, institution, department, position and research interests where those fields are empty. You can edit anything before saving.

Fetch uses the public ORCID API (pub.orcid.org) and works for any iD whose record is public — no ORCID login and no API key are required.

Connect & Sync (link your account)

Go to My Profile → ORCID (/research/orcid).
Under Your ORCID application, click Add credentials and paste the Client ID + Client Secret from an ORCID API client you register at orcid.org/developer-tools (set the redirect URI to your portal's /research/orcid/callback). The secret is encrypted at rest and never shown again.
Click Connect & Sync with ORCID and authorise on orcid.org.
Once linked you can Pull profile from ORCID, Sync works, or Disconnect at any time.

Pull profile vs Sync works

Pull profile refreshes your name/institution/interests from your public record (works even without Connect & Sync).
Sync works imports your publication list — available after Connect & Sync.

For Administrators

Scheduled sync

A daily task keeps linked researchers' profiles current:

php symfony research:orcid-sync            # all linked researchers (profiles)
php symfony research:orcid-sync --works    # also pull Works (for token-linked researchers)
php symfony research:orcid-sync --id=42    # a single researcher

Add it to cron (e.g. daily at 02:00). It is tokenless for the profile pull, so it works even before any researcher completes Connect & Sync.

No global ORCID account required

The public Fetch and Pull profile paths need no ORCID API client. Only Connect & Sync (Works pull/push) needs a client — and each researcher can register their own, so administrators don't have to provision a shared key.

Data stored

research_orcid_link — the linked iD, encrypted OAuth tokens, and last-synced timestamps.
researcher_orcid_credential — each researcher's own ORCID client credentials (client secret encrypted).

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