Course description

Your researcher identity is the link between you and everything you produce — papers, data, reviews, grants. This course shows you how to claim and connect that identity so your work is correctly credited, easy to find, and counts towards your career, wherever it appears.

Who it is for

Postgraduate students, early-career and established researchers, and the librarians who support them. No prior knowledge needed.

Learning outcomes

By the end you will be able to:

• Explain the name-disambiguation problem and why persistent identifiers solve it;
• Create and manage an ORCID iD, the universal researcher identifier;
• Recognise and connect database identifiers — Web of Science Researcher Profile and Scopus Author ID;
• Build effective academic profiles and judge networks critically;
• Link everything so outputs flow to your record automatically (“enter once, reuse often”).

Course outline

1. What Is Researcher Identity?
2. ORCID — Your Universal Researcher ID
3. Other Key Identifiers (Web of Science & Scopus)
4. Profiles & Academic Networks
5. Keeping It Connected & Current

How to study

Work through the topics in order. Each has a short lesson, a worked example, a free resource to explore, and a hands-on “Try it” step. The course is free and open — no fees, no barriers.

Licensing & attribution

Provided free by FRELIP under CC BY 4.0; adapted in part from openly-licensed UNESCO and institutional materials. Linked third-party resources keep their own licences.

Maintained by the FRELIP Open Courseware editorial team.